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Guides

How to check the citations in a brief.

Before a filing is signed, somebody opens every authority it cites and looks. This is what to look for, in what order, and where the published record answers each question.

Written 5 November 2026. Loupe reports what the sources say; it is not legal advice.

Five questions for every citation

A citation makes five claims at once. A cite check tests each of them against the record, not against the brief.

  • Does it exist?

    A case citation names a reporter, a volume and a first page. The opinion that starts on that page of that volume is one opinion: either it is this one, or it is somebody else’s. A statute names a title and a section of a code; the current code either has the section or does not.

  • Is it the one the brief names?

    The parties, the year and the court have to belong to the citation. A real citation under the wrong name is the commonest slip and the easiest to miss, because the citation itself checks out.

  • Does the pin cite fall inside the opinion?

    An opinion runs from its first page to its last. A pin cite before the first page or after the last cannot be right; one inside the range still has to say what the brief says it says. The pin cite has a guide of its own.

  • Are the quoted words the court’s?

    A quotation promises that these words appear in the opinion, in this order. Alterations go in brackets and omissions in ellipses; anything else is a misquotation, however small. Verifying a quotation has a guide of its own.

  • Does the link open?

    A web address in a brief is an authority like the others. It answers, it has moved, or it survives only in an archive, and the court will click it.

Two questions a cite check does not answer

Whether the case is still good law, and whether it supports your point.

The first is a citator’s work: subsequent history, later treatment, the reversal nobody noticed. The second is reading: the page the pin cite points to has to hold the proposition, in context, and no lookup settles that. A check that answers the five questions above leaves these two to a person, and says so.

By hand

Every question above has a public source. The work is opening it, forty times.

  • Cases

    The court’s own site for recent opinions; the reporters as scanned by Harvard’s Caselaw Access Project and held by CourtListener. Find the opinion that starts at the cited page, read the caption and the year, then turn to the pin cite.

  • Federal statutes and regulations

    The United States Code at GovInfo and at the House’s Office of the Law Revision Counsel; the Code of Federal Regulations at the eCFR. The section is there, in the current edition, or it is not.

  • State codes and court rules

    The legislature’s own site for the code; the court’s own site for its rules. A commercial database is a copy; the official site is the source.

  • Links

    Open each one. For a page that has gone, the Internet Archive may hold it as it was on the day it was cited.

A brief with forty authorities is an afternoon done this way, which is why it is the step that gets skipped at eleven at night. The order that keeps the afternoon short: list every authority first (a table of authorities is the list), then settle existence for all of them before turning to names, then pin cites, then quotations, then links. What is still open at the end is read, by a person, before the signature.

With Loupe

Paste the text or drop the PDF or Word file. Every citation in it is looked up: the five questions, against the published record.

For each case the report says whether it exists, whether it is the case the brief names, with its year and court, and whether the pin cite falls inside the opinion’s pages. Federal statutes, regulations, court rules and links are checked against their publishers. Each answer is one of three things: Holds up, a defect with what the record showed instead, or Not verified, which means the question could not be settled from the sources Loupe reached, not that the citation is wrong. Nothing is generated; the check is lookups, and the report names the source of each.

Signed in, which is free while Loupe is in testing, quotations are compared with the opinion’s own text, and the check is kept by matter, so colleagues can mark what they have read. The two questions no lookup answers stay yours, and the report says which citations are still open. How often Loupe is wrong is measured and published, with the documents it was measured on.

The checklist

  • List every authority

    Cases, statutes, regulations, rules, constitutional provisions, links. The table of authorities, if there is one, is the list; if there is not, build it.

  • Existence, for all of them

    Before anything else. A citation that does not exist ends the inquiry for that line.

  • Name, year, court

    The caption of the opinion that starts at the cited page, against the brief.

  • Pin cites

    Inside the opinion’s pages, and on the point.

  • Quotations

    Word for word, brackets and ellipses included.

  • Links

    Open, moved, or archived.

  • What is still open

    Read it. Then sign.

If your court has a rule on AI in filings, what it asks of the signer is quoted from the court’s own document, and the check page drafts the statement for it.

Check a filing

Paste the brief or drop the file, and Loupe looks up every citation in the published record. It doesn’t generate anything, and what it can’t settle it marks “not verified”, never clean.