Legal Citation Manual Generator

Problem

Legal footnotes are not just author, title, and venue. A single citation may involve Chinese books, journal articles, online sources, statutes, court cases, English materials, or multilingual sources, and may also require first citation, short forms, repetition, lead-in words, and punctuation rules. Generated from memory, these citations easily drift: a URL is treated like a book, upload date or access date is omitted, bracketed year for normative documents is confused with parentheses for case numbers, English journal styles vary, and missing fields are silently dropped.

How it works

The skill runs a fixed workflow:

• Identify input and extract fields: supports text, URL, and images; links and images are read before classification, so type is not guessed from the URL alone, and extracted fields are echoed for review.
• Route to the matching rules: selects the relevant core.md, cn-print.md, cn-online.md, cn-legal.md, en.md, other-lang.md, or repeat-cite.md file and applies the corresponding handbook provisions.
• Output a stable structure: returns the main footnote, optional compliant variants, short/repeat forms, and missing-field notes, while applying lead-in words such as see, see also, in, quoted in, see again, and see additionally.
• Surface missing information: generates from known data first, marks gaps with placeholders such as [missing page] and [missing publisher], then lists what must be completed.

Boundaries

It is intended for standardized legal citations, not for verifying primary sources. When the document type is ambiguous, clarify first or provide the two most likely formats. If a print edition exists, prefer the print citation over the web version. Final citations should still be checked against the copyright page, article first page, official text, or accessible source page.