Style & Citations Guide

Welcome to the Note Style and Citation Guide!

Digest Notes are JOLT Student Notes adapted for the online medium. This means you will need to follow the style and citation rigor expected in a Law Journal Note, subject to a few adaptions for it being posted online.

Requirements

Follow The Bluebook (20th Edition) whitepages where its rules do not directly conflict with the rules laid out here.

Organization

Use section headings to separate your Note into digestable parts. Do not precede your section headings with any counters (e.g. Roman Numerals, Arabic Numerals, Letters, etc.). Do not use subsections.

Citations

Provide a citation for every statement that is not your original idea.

As Digest Notes are not paginated, do not use footnotes. Your citations will, instead, be in endnotes. In citations, use italics instead of underlines and normal font instead of small-caps.

But keep in mind that Readers will rarely refer to endnotes. As such, try to tailor endnotes to contain only citations. To convey helpful but nonessential information, consider placing them in in-text parentheticals or cutting them out entirely.

Style

Since Digest is available online, some formatting preferences may be different, so this Digest citation guide supersedes the generic JOLT Style Guide. Below are some common items to check:

  • Only one space between sentences.

  • Do not include spaces around an em dash (“—“)

  • Quotation marks around acronyms located in parentheticals, e.g. Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (“DMCA”)

  • Do not capitalize the following party names: plaintiff, defendant, appellee, and appellant

  • Do not hyphenate the following words: decisionmaker, factfinder

There are also some additional requirements specific to a Digest Note:

  • Use only italics for formatting emphasis (not bold or underline).

  • Do not use small-caps.

Commas

Use the serial comma. Read here for more information.

Symbols

Outside of citations, do not use "§" and "¶." Instead, always spell out and capitalize "Section" and "Paragraphs" in place of symbols.

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