ABA law students must complete a faculty-supervised upper class writing assignment, known as the “cert” paper. This tutorial is intended to help students develop their abilities to write effective, efficient research papers.
This research aims to develop an advanced legal information platform for the highly complex and difficult modern international “international” legal work (as explained in the previous introductory section). The platform offers advanced relevant services through the automatic decomposition, semantic annotation, translation, etc. of legal documents and the creation of big, linked, open legal data.
Basic Citations
Citations are a way to acknowledge that you are using research, words, information and quotes that are not your own. The in-text citations that you place in the text of your paper help readers locate the sources for these elements and are used to compile the list of references, or bibliography, at the end of your research paper. No matter what citation style you are using, there are certain basic pieces of information that all citations should include.
The nitty gritty details of how to format these in-text citations differ according to your citation style. But there are some commonalities among the different styles. No matter what the style, your in-text citations should always include the author’s name, the title of the book or article, and the date of publication. For articles, the name of the journal, volume, issue and page number should also be included. For web-based resources, you should provide a link or DOI so that the reader can retrieve the article.
Generally Accepted or Observable Facts
Usually, you only need to cite facts that are not original to you (i.e., those that have been previously proven through credible sources). However, some occurrences may warrant an exception, such as the fact that smoking is bad for your health or that water is comprised of hydrogen and oxygen. You should be cautious when determining whether a particular fact is considered common knowledge, so consult with your instructor for more advice on this matter.
Summary Citations
Summaries are a type of source material that require a citation, as they are still considered borrowed ideas from an original source. A brief quotation, or paraphrase, of the original idea should be followed by the citation. For longer paragraphs that contain a summary of the source material, you should include the citation at the end of the paragraph. It is important to keep track of the information that you are citing so that when it comes time for your reference list, it is easy to compile the correct entries. For more advice on this, see the citation resources listed below.
Advanced Citations
This course provides students with an advanced, hands-on opportunity to learn the skills and frame of reference required to function independently as legal researchers. It is designed to enable the students, both now and in their professional careers, to map out a coherent research plan for any topic that they are not familiar with. It also teaches them to understand how information is organized and how different sources may be consulted to find what they are looking for.
It covers the rules for standard American citation style, as well as the numbered citation sequence system commonly used in engineering and IT fields (Nell CS, Mooney KA. Plant structural complexity mediates trade-off in direct and indirect plant defense by birds, Ecology. 2019;100(1):1-7).
The course requires four legal research memos in two parts, a short-answer quiz, and class participation. Discussion and presentations will be supplemented by use of specialized legal databases available at Williams, including LexisNexis, Westlaw, and Bloomberg Law.
Advanced Citation Methods
Some types of scholarly work require more advanced citations. For example, you may need to cite government reports, technical or scientific articles and books that have more than one author. You may also need to cite websites or specific paragraphs within a website. These citations are usually included in a footnote or an in-text citation but should be listed in the bibliography if requested by your instructor.
There are many citation formats and most fields have a style manual or formatting guide that people follow. These manuals usually include rules about when to cite and how to format different types of sources.