Don’t interrupt sentences with citations.

Avoid inserting legal citations in the middle of sentences, interrupting the sentence’s flow to provide bibliographic information that most readers ignore.

Lawyers commonly place citations immediately after the sentence portions containing the proposition those citations support. The ALWD Guide to Legal Citation and The Bluebook call for doing so.¹ But if you put citations in the main text of a legal brief (as most attorneys do), following this rule produces sentences that are unwieldy and difficult to read.

Here’s a poor example — a relatively tame one, since the sentence uses only one citation per proposition and omits parentheticals:

Further, because California law does not allow use of adjudicated juvenile offenses in capital sentencing, see People v. Lewis, 43 Cal. 4th 415, 530 (2008), overruled on other grounds by People v. Black, 58 Cal. 4th 912, 919–20 (2014), the use of uneducated misconduct during a capital proceeding violates equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment, Woodson v. North Carolina, 428 U.S. 280, 305 (1976) (plur. op.).²

Interrupting sentences with in-text citations sacrifices sentences’ flow and cohesiveness to provide bibliographic information that most readers ignore. It also imposes an additional mental load on the reader by delaying the sentence’s end, requiring the reader to hold information communicated earlier in the sentence in working memory for a longer time.

Good legal briefs use effective sentences.

Well-crafted sentences are crucial to good prose, but sentence mechanics are typically given short shrift in legal writing. The techniques underlying good sentences are rarely taught in legal-writing courses or insisted on by supervising attorneys. My book Elegant Legal Writing aims to improve this situation by devoting a chapter (ch. 4, “Strong Sentences”) to sentence-crafting techniques.

Mid-sentence citations are blemishes; any convention calling for them should be questioned. No other form of writing — not even legal scholarship — routinely interrupts sentences with in-text citations. Lawyers’ practice of doing so, and the citation conventions that perpetuate and excuse the practice, are oddities. Consider how it would go if the practice of including full citations not only in body text but in the middle of sentences were suddenly adopted by book and magazine publishers; readers would rightly see the practice as an unacceptable distraction.

The practice of interrupting sentences with in-text citations is characteristic of our profession’s general unawareness of the principles that make some sentences more readable and aesthetically pleasing. It doesn’t have to be that way. I propose two solutions below.

Solution #1: Put most citations in footnotes.

In Elegant Legal Writing, I advocate normalizing footnotes in legal briefs and show why using footnotes enhances readability and aligns with the principles of good design. I go further than Bryan Garner, whose contributions to the field include making inroads on the myth that lawyers shouldn’t use footnotes.³

Here is a suggested revision of the example above that moves the citations to footnotes. Note how this preserves the concern underlying the ALWD/Bluebook rule by showing that the People v. Lewis citation only supports the first part of the sentence:

Further, because California law does not allow use of adjudicated juvenile offenses in capital sentencing,¹ the use of uneducated misconduct during a capital proceeding violates equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment.²

¹ See People v. Lewis, 43 Cal. 4th 415, 530 (2008), overruled on other grounds by People v. Black, 58 Cal. 4th 912, 919–20 (2014).

² See Woodson v. North Carolina, 428 U.S. 280, 305 (1976) (plur. op.).

Solution #2: Add explanatory parentheticals.

If you refuse to put citations in footnotes (or your supervisor won’t allow you to), you can still reduce the mental and aesthetic toll of in-text citations by putting them in standalone “citation sentences” rather than allowing them to interrupt ordinary sentences. If you wish to clarify that a citation only supports one proposition rather than an entire sentence, you can add explanatory parentheticals:

Further, because California law does not allow use of adjudicated juvenile offenses in capital sentencing, the use of uneducated misconduct during a capital proceeding violates equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. See People v. Lewis, 43 Cal. 4th 415, 530 (2008) (“We have long held that juvenile adjudications are not prior felony convictions within the meaning of” Cal. Pen. Code § 190.3), overruled on other grounds by People v. Black, 58 Cal. 4th 912, 919–20 (2014); Woodson v. North Carolina, 428 U.S. 280, 305 (1976) (holding that the practice of automatically imposing death sentences when a defendant is convicted of specified crimes violates the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments).

This solution is less desirable because it introduces clutter that the attorney would otherwise have omitted. But it’s still an improvement.

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Ryan McCarl is a founding partner of Rushing McCarl LLP, author of Elegant Legal Writing (U. Cal. Press 2024), and adjunct professor at Loyola Law School. For more writing tips, subscribe to the Elegant Legal Writing newsletter and follow Ryan on LinkedIn. McCarl’s book is now available for preorder.

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1. See Association of Legal Writing Directors & Coleen M. Barger, ALWD Guide to Legal Citation § 34.4(a) (5th ed. 2014); The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation R. B1.1, at 5 (Columbia Law Review Ass’n et al. eds., 20th ed. 2015). The two citation manuals use the same rules, but the ALWD Guide is better organized and easier to use.

2. Since this post focuses on writing mechanics rather than substance, we’ll overlook the fact that the Woodson citation seemingly doesn’t support the proposition it follows.

3. See, e.g., Bryan A. Garner, The Citational Footnote, 7 Scribes J. Leg. Writing 97 (1998–2000).

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