Relex citations

Citation Discipline: No Blind Citations

Community legal packs audited themselves and found ~30% of their own memorized docket numbers were wrong. The cure is mechanical, not aspirational: label every assertion's epistemic tier, obey the hard locks, and ground filing-grade citations in cached verbatim text (relex-research).

The three tiers — label everything you assert

1. Secured — quotable and filing-grade. Only: text in the Relex verbatim cache, the user's own documents, or an official source you (or the harness) fetched live this session. Cite normally.
2. Plausible — verify — you believe it from context or memory but it is not secured. Flag inline: [verify: <what to check, where>]. A draft may carry [verify] flags only in internal work product — never in anything that leaves the practice; those become directives (POST /research/scrape).
3. Never-use — from model memory alone: docket/file numbers, ECLI strings, commentary margin numbers, page/paragraph pinpoints, verbatim quotes, database identifiers. Do not write them even with a flag. Encode the authority as an anchor instead (below) and acquire.

Marking tier 2/3 honestly is clean lawyerly practice, not weakness.

Hard locks (non-negotiable)

• No proprietary blind cites. Never emit a paywalled-database locator (BeckRS, juris, Westlaw/Lexis pin cites, La Ley…) from memory. Only if the user supplied it or a licensed live source verified it. When one appears in inherited text and can't be verified: extract court/date/docket, find the free official source, else replace with [proprietary locator removed — verify against a free official source].
• No citation without minimum data. A case citation needs court + decision form + date + docket/neutral cite + a free, checkable source; a pinpoint (para/margin number) only from the source itself.
• Renamed/moved-source traps. Sources get renamed, re-numbered, consolidated (commentaries change editors; statutes get recodified; transpositions land). If your knowledge of a source predates today, verify the source still exists under that name/number before citing it.
• Statute first. Norm text → then verified case law → literature only when supplied or live-verified.
• Topic-match check. Before attaching any authority: does the holding actually support the proposition? A real citation for the wrong proposition is still a false citation.
• No deadline from memory — hard lock; the canonical deadline rule lives in relex-matter (compute from the secured norm text, flag for human verification).

Anchors, not memorized citations

When you know the line of jurisprudence but not a secured citation, write an anchor and acquire:

<topic/line> — <probable court/bench> — verify in <official free source>
e.g. "constructive dismissal; hearing duty — Federal Labour Court, 2nd senate
      (line since mid-2000s) — verify in the court's official database"

Anchors are honest retrieval keys — they contain nothing to hallucinate.

Citation schema by family (one line each; jurisdiction packs carry detail)

• US — Bluebook; controlling vs persuasive marked; pin cites from source.
• UK — OSCOLA + neutral citation.
• DE — court, form, date, Aktenzeichen (+ECLI), source, Rn. from source; no stare-decisis framing (§ 31 BVerfGG aside).
• CH — BGE/ATF volume-part-page + consideration (E.); unpublished by docket.
• FR — court, chamber, date, n° pourvoi; ECLI where available.
• IT/ES/RO — court, section, number/year (+ECLI where issued).
• EU — case number + name + ECLI.
• CA — McGill Guide + neutral citation. JP — court, date, reporter.
• AU — AGLC4 + neutral citation.

In Relex specifically

• The server verifier rejects drafts citing law without cached verbatim text — when it does, that's a grounding gap: issue the directive, re-reason.
• Record grounded issues in the ontology with their ground ("settled — grounded by cached § 823 BGB text"), so the understanding carries its evidence.
• Official-source whitelist per jurisdiction lives in ../jurisdictions/*.md; finding aids (aggregators) are for finding, the citation names the official source.