Learn English – In legal citations, why are “see”, “see also”, etc., in italics

citationitalicslegalesereference

  1. In legal citations, why do people put "see", "see also", "e.g.", etc., in italics?

    Please don't just say, "because that's the custom." I'd like to know just enough about the evolution of this custom to develop some intuition regarding when one should italicize the little introductory words.

  2. Does it make any difference whether I'm inside or outside a pair of parentheses?

  3. Within my document, when I'm referring the reader to a page of something normal, may I continue to use "see", "but see", etc., without italics?

Notes:

(a) My document is a petition to a review officer, who will know that I am a pro se parent, so it won't be hugely embarrassing if I don't get this stuff exactly right.

(b) I tried half a dozen guides to legal citations, and chose https://law.resource.org/pub/us/code/blue/IndigoBook.pdf. If there's something you think I will like better, please feel free to make a different suggestion.

(c) Yes, I know about Law SE. If necessary I will ask over there… but I wanted to try here first, because I think you guys would probably be better able to help me get some intuition about it.

Edit

Example.

The review officer's decision in this case, which the Second Circuit reaffirmed, reveals that the student coped successfully with her bipolar disorder and ADHD without the use of specialized instruction: quotes (see name-of-case).

But as legal scholars have observed, bla-bla-bla (see name-of-article).

Did I do that right? I italicized "see" in the first sentence, which cites a legal decision, but not in the second sentence, which cites a peer-reviewed journal article.

Best Answer

If you read through the document that you have linked to (The Indigo Book), you will see (in section R4.1) that these terms are signals that introduce citation clauses and sentences. Section R2.1 specifies that signals should be italicised, presumably to draw the reader's attention to them. It goes on to say that, when these documents were created using typewriters, signals were underlined, since no other form of highlighting was universally available.