Citations

I got an email recently from someone who said my including frequent citations (e.g., "People v. Smith," "State v. Smith") is a distraction when someone is reading a post.

I'm afraid that didn't really surprise me. I find it tedious to put all those short citations in, and I'm sorry if they are distracting.

He seemed to think I include them because I'm a compulsive (even nerdy) law professor type who HAS to have a citation for every statement, even when it's referring back to a case I've already cited in full.

I am enough of a compulsive (though perhaps not nerdy) law professor type to include citations for every statement I make in a law review article . . . because if I don't, the law review editors who are working on that article will insist that I do. (Sometimes they even want more than I've already included.)

I'm not, though, compulsive (or nerdy) enough to need to repeat short citations over and over in a blog post. The reason I include them is this: Very early in the history of this blog, I did a post on a case and did what I always do: Summarized the facts in the case from the court's opinion or quoted the facts as given in the opinion. All I know about the facts in a case is usually what I read in the opinion; sometimes I look for more facts in online news stories; when I do that, I cite those stories for whatever I take from them.

When I did this with the case I wrote about very early in the history of this blog, I ran across a . . . shall we say, very strange man. I got well over 40 emails from him, none of which really made any sense. He accused me of "ruining his life" (???), among other things; and some of the emails were at least implicitly threatening.

I had not included the repetitive short citations to the opinion in that post, even though it was obvious that the opinion is where the facts I referenced came from. As a defensive tactic, in an attempt to avoid encountering another person like this fellow, I began using the repetitive cites. I really doubt it would have made any difference if I had used them in the post on this case, but they make me feel better, at least.

So . . . I'm sorry for the stuttering citations. Some people just make things difficult.