Finally, this edition reflects the Unified Court System's policy of recognizing privacy and safety concerns, including guidance on redaction of personal identifying and other private information in judicial writings. The Style Manual has been expanded to provide enhanced guidance on citation of electronic materials and Internet sources.

Citation formats and examples have been provided for new sources of New York authority, including the Guide to New York Evidence being compiled by the Judicial Advisory Committee on Evidence established last year. This year, the Bureau has revised the Style Manual to update citation formats, add citation examples, clarify existing rules and add new rules to keep pace with the rapid growth of electronic materials and legal research technologies.Īmong the many notable additions designed to facilitate precision and clarity in judicial writings are new or amended rules clarifying the mandatory elements of initial citations and omitting unnecessary information in shortened citation to previously cited sources, such as the use of 'supra' as an element of a short form citation. Happily, the Bureau's excellent Style Manual achieves all these goals - balancing the need to provide enough information about references so that readers can follow a line of argument to its legal sources with the need to keep the writing as clear and uncluttered as possible.

This technical language of 'legal citation,' which is absolutely essential to legal writing, would be impossible to master without a widely accepted guide that promotes consistency, conciseness and precision. No judge writing an opinion or lawyer drafting a brief can do so properly without citing to pertinent legal authorities - statutes, regulations, prior court decisions, and treatises and secondary materials - to support their conclusions and arguments. Hooks and his excellent staff not only publish the Official Reports, the permanent record of the decisions and proceedings of the New York State courts, but also publish and maintain the Official Style Manual, which has long served as the authoritative reference work on legal citation for the New York courts and the lawyers who practice before them. Hooks, for inviting me to submit this Foreword to the newly revised 2017 Official Style Manual of the New York State Law Reporting Bureau. I want to thank our State Reporter, William J.

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