loupe.legal

Guides

Verifying a quotation against the opinion.

A quotation is the strongest claim a brief makes about an authority: not that it holds this, but that it says this, in these words. The check is to find them.

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

The rule

Word for word, with every departure marked.

An altered letter or word goes in brackets; an omission is an ellipsis; added emphasis is announced; a quotation inside the quotation keeps its own marks and its own source (the Bluebook’s Rules 5.2 and 5.3). Since 2017 a brief may instead write “(cleaned up)” after the citation, the parenthetical Jack Metzler proposed in Cleaning Up Quotations, 18 J. App. Prac. & Process 143, and promise that only the housekeeping was removed: internal quotation marks, brackets, citations, footnote signals. What it does not permit is a changed word. Under either convention the test is the same: a reader with the opinion open must find the quoted words, in order.

How quotations go wrong

  • A paraphrase in quotation marks

    The opinion holds what the brief says, in different words. The sense is right and the quotation is false.

  • Two sentences stitched together

    Each half is in the opinion; the sentence is not. An ellipsis would have been honest and a generator does not write them.

  • The wrong voice

    The words are in the volume, in the dissent, the syllabus, the headnote or a party’s argument as the court summarised it. “The court held” is then untrue.

  • Somebody else’s words

    The opinion is quoting an earlier case. The words exist; they belong to the earlier court, and the citation should say so.

  • Words the opinion does not contain

    The quotation was composed. A pin cite and a confident parenthetical make it look read.

By hand

Open the opinion’s text, search a distinctive phrase, then compare character by character.

The official reporter’s scan or the court’s own slip opinion is the text; a commercial database’s copy is a copy. Search for the least common three or four words of the quotation, not the first ones: the first words are the ones most often altered. When the phrase is found, read the whole sentence it sits in and the one before it, check whose voice it is, and check that the page is the one the pin cite names. When the phrase is not found, search a second phrase before concluding anything; a transcription error in the brief and a composed quotation look alike until the second search.

What Loupe compares

Signed in, which is free while Loupe is in testing, each quotation is compared with the opinion’s own text.

The report shows the words that match, the words that differ, and the printed page they sit on; where the opinion’s parts are marked, it says whose words they are. A quotation whose passage is not found is reported as not found, with the text searched; a quotation from an opinion whose text Loupe does not hold is reported as not verified, never as clean. The comparison is of words, not of meaning: whether the quoted sentence supports the proposition is reading, and stays yours. How often this comparison is wrong, on named opinions, is on the accuracy page.

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.