Why is the A in "Article" capitalized in legal articles when referring to itself? [closed]

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Closed 2 years ago .

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?

6,280 74 74 gold badges 34 34 silver badges 40 40 bronze badges asked Mar 4, 2022 at 20:44 Law Article Law Article 13 1 1 silver badge 4 4 bronze badges It sounds like it's just an ideomatic style convention for law journals. Commented Mar 4, 2022 at 21:01

It sounds ridiculous to me. Why would self-reference to an article merit an upper case letter? In the first sentence, aren't they referring to an article of law? Different meaning.

Commented Mar 4, 2022 at 21:34

@Lambie I agree, it does sound interesting. In the first sentence, the author is referring to his own article by using the third person.

Commented Mar 4, 2022 at 22:26

I said the use of a capital a might not be an article that is a written piece. It may be an article, like, an Article of the US Constitution or some contract.

Commented Mar 5, 2022 at 0:13

I’m voting to close this question because it asks about a convention used in legalese rather than standard English usage.

Commented Mar 5, 2022 at 12:47

1 Answer 1

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.

answered Mar 5, 2022 at 5:18 1,178 3 3 silver badges 12 12 bronze badges

The convention becomes less puzzling if one takes into account that it is not unusual in legal writing to treat other common nouns as proper names of sorts in the context of a particular document, and to consequently capitalise them. For example, the plaintiff in a particular case may be referred to as Plaintiff (capitalised) in the documents submitted in the course of litigating that case.

Commented Mar 5, 2022 at 16:38