Who can post
Anyone can read The Commons. To post, comment or report, sign in with your email address, choose a handle and agree to these guidelines. You must be 18 or older to join. Public posts and profiles can be seen and used by search engines and AI services that crawl the web.
Not legal advice
Nothing in The Commons is legal advice, and nothing posted here creates an attorney-client relationship with anyone: not with Citation Code, its author, the moderators or other members. Members are not your lawyer. Do not ask for help with a legal matter of your own or anyone else’s, and do not give it. If you need legal advice, talk to a lawyer licensed where you are.
Confidentiality
Never post client confidences, privileged information, or details of a matter from a job, internship, clinic, externship or clerkship, even with the names taken out, if someone could work out who or what it is. The confidentiality rules of your firm, office or chambers apply here too.
Personal information
Do not post anyone’s personal information: home or email addresses, phone numbers, ID or account numbers, health details, photos, or anything else that identifies a private person. That includes your own. Your email address is never shown in The Commons, so there is no reason to post it. Do not single out classmates, professors or coworkers. (A profile photo of yourself is your choice; see Profile photos.)
Honor codes
Do not post or ask for questions or answers from an exam that is still open or that you were told not to share, take-home exams, graded assignments in progress, or anything else your school’s honor code says not to discuss. Asking how a citation rule works is fine. Asking someone to do graded work for you is not. When in doubt, ask your professor first.
No harassment
Disagree with ideas, not people. No threats, slurs, hate, sexual content, stalking or pile-ons. Do not pretend to be someone else, such as a professor, a school, a moderator or Citation Code, and do not use a second account to get around a moderator’s decision.
Copyright
Quote briefly, say where the quotation comes from, and link to the source instead of copying it. Never paste the text of The Citation Code, in print or online, or of other paid materials such as commercial outlines, bar-review courses, casebooks or citation manuals. Quoting the words of a court opinion or a statute is fine; copying a publisher’s headnotes or summaries is not. Posts that copy protected text are removed.
Profile photos
A profile photo is optional, and it follows the same rules as everything else here: no sexual or violent images, no hate symbols, nothing that harasses or mocks anyone, and no one’s personal information, such as an ID card, a document or an address. It can be a photo of you. Do not use someone else’s photo, or a photo of someone else, without their permission, and do not use a school’s, a firm’s or Citation Code’s logo to look official. An automatic check looks at photos before they are saved, and a photo it flags is refused. Moderators can remove a photo that breaks these rules. You can remove yours at any time in Settings, and change it there unless your account is suspended or banned.
Spam and links
No advertising, affiliate links, paid services or self-promotion. A post or comment can hold up to 5 links. Links through a shortener, such as bit.ly, are refused, because they hide where they go. A new member’s links wait for a moderator’s approval, and so does anything that looks like spam. Posting the same text twice within a day is refused.
Schools are self-reported
A school on a profile or a post is the one that member chose. We do not verify it, and it is always marked “self-reported”. Do not claim to speak for a school, and do not pick one to mislead. Choosing no school is always fine.
Reporting
If a post or comment breaks these rules, choose Report on it and pick the closest reason. Moderators see the reason and any note you add, never who sent the report. You can report each item once. When 3 members report the same item, it is hidden until a moderator reviews it. Reports are for rule-breaking, not for disagreements.
Moderation
Moderators can approve, remove and restore posts and comments, lock a post so only moderators can comment, and pin a post. They can suspend an account for a set number of days, or ban it. When a moderator approves, removes or restores your post or comment, locks or reopens your post, or suspends, bans or restores your account, you get a notification here saying what happened, with the reason for a removal, suspension or ban. It does not name the moderator. Moderators can also remove a profile photo that breaks these guidelines; you get a notification with the reason when they do.
Before a new or edited post or comment appears, an automatic screen reads it for the problems these guidelines describe. Anything it flags waits for a moderator, who decides; the screen never removes anything on its own. The privacy policy says how it works.
Moderators never see your email address. A suspended or banned member can still read The Commons and delete their own posts and comments.
The reference desk
The reference desk holds answers from The Citation Code team to common citation questions. They are posted by the team’s own account, marked Team, never under a member’s handle. Each answer ends by saying how it was written and checked: most are drafted with AI assistance, then checked against the sources they link, by the team or by a moderator, and the answer names the date. Nothing goes up until it is checked, at most 3 a day, and an answer that is changed goes back for review.
A team answer is about citation form, not legal advice, and it follows these guidelines like everything else here. Your court’s rules, your journal’s style sheet and your professor’s instructions come first. If you think an answer is wrong, say so in its comments, or report it.
Appeals
If you think a moderator got it wrong, say so through the report form. Choose “Something else”, give the address of the post or comment and your handle, and explain why. Add your email address if you want an answer. Every report is read.
Your data
You can delete your Commons data at any time in Settings. That deletes your profile and releases your handle, deletes your profile photo, takes down your posts and comments, deletes your notifications, and keeps the reports you sent without your name on them. Settings lists exactly what it does and does not do, and the privacy policy says what The Commons stores.
Changes
We may update these guidelines. The date at the top shows when they last changed.