Table of authorities

A table of authorities is part of a legal brief that contains an index of the cases, statutes, and secondary sources cited.

The intention is to allow law clerks and judges to easily and rapidly identify and access the legal authorities cited in a litigation brief.

The "Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation" is relied upon in many jurisdictions to provide rules for citing legal authorities.

[8][9] Leading word-processing software, including Microsoft Word and its competitor WordPerfect, have built-in capabilities to semi-automate the creation of a table of authorities.

Even so, creating a table of authorities using Word has been said to "strike ... fear into the hearts of legal support staff" and has been called "intimidating".

[13] To simplify the process further, other applications and plug-ins for word processors provide similar functionality as well as additional features such as automatically finding and marking citations in the document.

Sample Table of Authorities. Shows grouping by Cases, Statutes and Other Authorities.
This sample table of authorities shows the common grouping according to Cases, Statutes and Other Authorities.
Sample table of Points and Authorities. This example shows the citations in order of their appearance under each section of the Table of Contents.
Sample table of Points and Authorities. This example shows the citations in order of their appearance under each section of the Table of Contents.