Legal citations in legal documents need special handling. If we could mark a
string as a legal citation (much as we mark a string as suitable for a table of
contents or an index), we could (1) quickly hop from citation to citation to
proof each one, for cite checking, and to verify the correct mixture of italic
and Roman is used, and (2) generate a table of authorities including reverse
entries by standard rules.

Citations often use different linguistic and character styles (spellings,
syntax, case, punctuation, mixing italicization and Roman, etc.), and users may
prefer to proofread them separately and with more rigor.

User spell-check dictionaries should be able to accept multi-word entries for
single phrases, such as case names. This would be particularly handy where, for
example, the same case name applies to two or more cases in the same court and
that culminated in different decisions (as when a case was appealed, decided,
remanded to a lower court, appealed again, and decided again), resulting in
Withers being rejected as a second citation but Withers I and Withers II being
acceptable.

Shorthand names for subsequent references should be acceptable and correlated
with specific long forms. That would allow a table of authorities to associate
Lee v. Park cited on p. 23 with Lee, supra, cited on p. 34 as citing the same
case and getting one table entry once the user has told OOo to do so for that
combination for that document.

Most of the time, legal sources are commonly cited following standard citational
conventions. This is true for Federal, state, and big-city organic laws,
statutes, and case law and for major law journals and treatises. Foreign law and
common law are infrequently cited, except by some practitioners whose practice
depends on them, and this may be somewhat true of small-jurisdiction local law
(town law, etc.). Expansion of OOo into international markets can be accompanied
by localization of legal citation rules.

Ideally, such a system would be user-heuristic, so that, for example, if an
agency comes up with a new scheme for identifying its regulatory sources or a
publisher introduces a new series of legal materials, a user could teach the
citational system to the software, or someone might publish a file that fulfills
the teaching function. True heurism is not necessary to add to OOo; what's
needed is a way for users to add new rules, especially for generating table of
authorities entries.

The table of authorities could allow looking up by any party, e.g., "Carver v.
Quinton" or "Quinton, Carter v.", in one alpha sequence, with a list of
elemental exceptions so that, e.g., it sorts "Ex parte Thomaso" under T and not
under E or P.

Also sorting the table by other citational elements would speed verification
against hardbound volumes or fee-based legal online services, for example, all
F.3d cites, all Lexis cites, and so on.

This is based on U.S. practice; that of other common law nations (e.g., U.K.,
Australia, N.Z., and Canada) is fundamentally similar but different in detail. I
don't know how other nations handle these things. Within the U.S., some
conventions vary; while "N.Y." and "F.3d" prevail, "NY" and "F3d" also occur, as
do "N. Y." and "F. 3d".

I'm using OOo Writer 2.4.0 without Java Runtime Environment on Linux Fedora Core
4 with Gnome 2.10.0 desktop on a Pentium 4 laptop. I didn't see these features.

Somewhat related: Issue 39592.

Thank you.

-- 
Nick