Hereinafter: A Legal Citation Program

This package provides automated management and formatting of legal citations in LaTeX documents. It implements the citation system described in The Indigo Book: A Manual of Legal Citation, and is also largely compatible with other widely-used legal citation systems such as those described in A Uniform System of Citation (the Bluebook) and the ALWD Guide to Legal Citation. More generally, the package provides a framework with which other legal citation systems may be implemented, such as the OSCOLA and Chicago systems.

Legal citation is more complex than other citation formats, due to the many different ways in which citations are used in legal documents and the wider range of types of documents cited. Legal citation systems typically provide for multiple, context-dependent citation forms, different formatting depending on the nature of the document being written, and stateful interactions among citations that affect formatting. This package is intended to provide comprehensive support for the wide range of uses of legal citations, enabling writers to take advantage of capabilities beyond what general citation management software typically provides.

To implement these systems, the package introduces a domain-specific language for input of citations and extends the underlying data model of references and citations, in order to accommodate distinctive features of legal citation. It also deals with the unique complexities of legal citation formatting. It handles the proper selection of various citation forms, such as selection of long or short citation forms across footnotes, inline textual citations, and citations parenthetically included inside other citations. It provides facilities especially important for legal documents, such as tables of authorities, complex internal cross-referencing, and abbreviation tracking. And it includes an extensive list of document types that may be cited, in view of the many different citation forms that legal citation manuals typically use.

Author

The author of this package is Charles Duan, who may be reached at cduan@wcl.american.edu. Please contact him with any comments, bugs, or feature requests.

License

This package is available under a GNU General Public License, version 3, as stated in the file LICENSE.md. The documentation is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Further Documentation

The following are the major documentation files needed to get started using this package:

• INSTALL.md: How to install, generate package files from source, and run tests
• DOCUMENTATION.md: The various forms of documentation provided, and how to compile them from the source files
• manual/hicite-manual.pdf: The user manual for the package