I looked at ten different law articles; when refering to itself, the letter A in Article is capitalized. For example, in the abstract it would say something like:
This Article proposes modifying the tax-exempt status.
But when the word article is refering to another article (not itself) it says
an article by Professor X argues for it.
I might be missing something basic here, but isn't "article" a common noun in either context and should therefore not be capitalized?
Best Answer
As Barmar suggested in the comment above, this is part of a convention followed by law journals and not part of English language usage in general.
The Yale Law Journal style guide specifies: 'In addition to the words mentioned in Rule 8, YLJ capitalizes the following terms in main text: “Article,” “Essay,” “Note,” “Review,” etc., when the author refers to his or her own piece (but not when the author refers to other works).' The articles you looked at are probably in publications that follow similar guidelines.