Description
For Week 2 ASSIGNMENT, you will answer a few short introductory question and then you will be reviewing two documents– a respondent’s brief to the United States Supreme Court and a law review journal article to check for proper citation in accordance with the Harvard Blue Book.
Assume the following: You have been hired as a copy editor to review documents related to legal issues. You have your Harvard Bluebook in front of you as your reference guide. In each document, there are 15 highlighted RED citations (disregard all other colors including yellow and blue.) Although there are about 200 citations in each document, your job is to only review 15 in each document as highlighted in red. Your job is to make sure that the citations are correct. In each document, you will determine the validity of the citation. Is the citation correct according to the Harvard Blue Book? Be able to correct a wrong citation is the key.
FOR EACH DOCUMENT– This is the format of your review. You may use a box table to organize the material.
Column 1;
Citation from the document
Column 2;
Correct or Not Correct
Column 3:
If correct, IDENTIFY THE BLUEBOOK or APA rule that supports it is correct.
If not correct, IDENTIFY THE BLUEBOOK rule that gives the correct method AND correct the citation as it should be.
Final comments: As you may have noted in the Power Point, citation takes a long time! It requires extreme attention to detail and may be tedious to some. Keep in mind that the goal is to have a quality, properly cited document. This exercise should acquaint you with some of the most common errors made in legal citation.
Also note, that both documents have been “doctored” to create a learning exercise.
Week 2 Assignment
Part A. Review the following document and proofread the RED citations. There will be 15 citations that need to be properly cited according to the TYPE of document that is being presented. This is a BRIEF for the United States Supreme Court. Answer the following questions and then locate the RED citations. Determine if the citation is correct according to the Harvard Blue Book, per the instructions. You can do this either by looking up the individual components of the citation to determine if correct OR by using the Harvard Blue Book to write the citation as would be required for this type of document. Hence, you can do it from a copyediting perspective (Is this correct?) or you can do it from the writer perspective (I am citing this case, law journal, etc.; how would I cite it according to the Harvard Blue book?) Either analysis will result in the same answer. In other words, either look for the mistake or cite it from the original reference.
1. Answer the following questions:
a. Identify the type of document:
b. Based upon this type of document, what part of the Harvard Blue Book is used for proper citation? Explain.
c. Examine the document. Identify WHERE the citations are located? (In other words, is the citation (which provides the source of the information) located within the document or at the end of the document?
2. Review and complete the 15 Citations, as instructed.