Citations
Last updated
Last updated
These fields allow us to add legal citation information to documents, particularly judicial opinions.
The basic format of a case citation is: (volume) (reporter) (page number) – e.g. 372 U.S. 335. A reporter is a publication containing judicial opinions, limited to a set of courts, and it organizes the opinions chronologically. The volume number indicates which volume of the reporter, and the page number indicates the starting page of the opinion. A reporters used to be a series of books – now everything is online, but the old system remains. Periodically, we add new reporters to our system.
Individual opinions can have multiple citations in different reporters, some of which lawyers will prefer to cite over others. We often collect multiple citations for a given opinion, with Citation 1 being the typically most preferred and Citation 3 being the least.
Note: Not all of our reporter abbreviations match Bluebook abbreviations.
(string)
The status of the citation information. There are a several possible values for this field:
Value | Description |
---|---|
For more information on the various reporters, see below.
(number)
The volume number for Citation 1. If there is no citation for Citation 1, this field is null
.
(string)
The reporter for Citation 1. If there is no citation for Citation 1, this field is null
.
Citation 1 is for our preferred reporters, which include several types of reporters:
(number)
The page number for Citation 1. If there is no citation for Citation 1, this field is null
.
(number)
The volume number for Citation 2. For Westlaw citations, the volume is the year of the opinion. If there is no citation for Citation 2, this field is null
.
(string)
The reporter for Citation 2. If there is no citation for Citation 2, this field is null
.
These are not the most preferred reporters, but many lawyers prefer them to those in Citation 3 (see cite_3_reporter). There are only two options for Citation 2:
(number)
The page number for Citation 2. If there is no citation for Citation 2, this field is null
.
(number)
The volume number for Citation 3. For Lexis citations, the volume is the year of the opinion. If there is no citation for Citation 3, this field is null
.
(string)
The reporter for Citation 3. If there is no citation for Citation 3, this field is null
.
These are the reporters we prefer not to use (and don't often collect). There are two types of reporters for Citation 3:
(number)
The page number for Citation 3. If there is no citation for Citation 3, this field is null
.
(boolean)
If the opinion was issued per curiam, which is Latin for "for the court." This means that the opinion wasn't authored by an individual judge.
(string)
Information following a citation giving the reader extra information about its context. We rarely use them, so citation_paren
is often null
.
Here are the other options:
Reporter | Example(s) | Description |
---|---|---|
Value | Description |
---|---|
Reporter | Example(s) | Description |
---|---|---|
Value | Description |
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