The Canons of Citechecking

Abstract

In the tradition of legal scholarly publishing -- a student editor with very little experience offering barely informed solutions to improve publishing -- I present here a set of so-called "canons of citechecking." Akin to the statutory canons of construction, they might be useful to editors for rationalizing when to insist (or not) that an author's proposition be supported. The idea, of course, is to offer reasonable, meaningful suggestions to authors rather than to blindly perform mechanical busywork or to play "gotcha!"

Keywords: citechecking, legal writing, citations, law reviews, journals