Definition
To cite is to do one of two distinct legal acts: (1) to summon a person to appear before a court or other legal tribunal by official notice, commanding their presence in a proceeding; or (2) to refer to, quote, or invoke a legal authority — a case, statute, regulation, treatise, or other source — in support of a legal argument or proposition.
As a noun, a cite (informal) is the citation itself: the reference to a legal authority or the document commanding appearance.
1. Procedural cite: The act of formally notifying a party that proceedings have been commenced against them and that their appearance is required. Used especially in probate, surrogate, and ecclesiastical court practice, where the instrument commanding appearance is called a citation rather than a summons.
2. Argumentative cite: The act of invoking legal authority — cases, statutes, secondary sources — to support a position before a court, in a brief, or in legal scholarship. This is the dominant modern use of the term.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A citation.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To call upon officially or authoritatively to appear, as before a court; to summon. Also: to quote or repeat a passage from a book or the words of another; to refer to or specify for support or proof.
Editorial note: The common and legal meanings track closely in both senses — summoning and quoting — but legal usage assigns each sense to a distinct procedural context with specific consequences. The everyday sense of "citing" a source is informal and carries no compulsory force; the procedural legal cite commands a response under penalty. Conflating the two senses obscures the distinction between citing authority in argument (persuasive) and citing a party to appear (compulsory).
Common Confusion
"Cite," "citation," and "summons" overlap in everyday usage but are not interchangeable in legal practice. A summons is the standard process commanding a defendant's appearance in civil litigation; a citation (or cite) in the procedural sense is the analogous instrument in probate, ecclesiastical, and certain regulatory proceedings. In traffic and municipal court practice, "citation" has acquired a third meaning: the written notice of a violation and required court appearance or fine payment. A researcher encountering "cite" or "citation" in historical sources must determine which procedural context governs before assuming the term's meaning.
Why It Matters in Research
The dual meaning of cite creates an indexing problem in historical legal sources. A treatise discussing "citations" in ecclesiastical court practice means something functionally equivalent to a summons; the same word in a brief-writing manual means references to authority. Corpus searches on "cite" or "citation" without contextual filtering will return both procedural documents and discussions of legal argument — a significant noise problem.
The procedural sense is concentrated in older sources and in materials dealing with probate, ecclesiastical, admiralty, and orphans' courts. Post-nineteenth-century materials increasingly use "citation" in the procedural sense only in those specialized courts and use "summons" for general civil practice. If your research spans both periods, the shift matters.
The argumentative sense has its own historical complexity. Citation practice — what counts as citable authority, hierarchy of sources, treatment of foreign precedent — has changed substantially. Early American practice was unsettled on whether English cases remained citable authority after independence. The formal citation formats researchers now rely on (Bluebook, ALWD) are twentieth-century standardizations; historical materials use wildly inconsistent citation forms that require knowledge of older reporter names and abbreviations to decode.
Citation as a noun also appears in the context of contempt proceedings: a citation for contempt is a distinct procedural instrument, neither a simple summons nor a reference to authority. Historical sources treating contempt will use "cite" in this sense.
When working in the Law Mind corpus, watch for "cite" appearing as part of compound terms — "cite to appear," "cited for contempt," "cited in support" — which will clarify which sense is operative. Cross-reference to citation as a standalone entry, which treats the noun form in greater depth, including formal citation format history and ecclesiastical practice.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are consistent on both senses. Black's (both editions), Bouvier's, and Anderson's all define cite as: (1) to summon or notify a party to appear, and (2) to refer to or quote authority in support of a proposition. The formulations are nearly identical across sources, suggesting a shared derivation from a common set of legal authorities.
Anderson's is the most useful for the procedural sense, specifically noting that citation "originally" referred to process before an ecclesiastical court — a historical note that the other dictionaries omit. This points researchers toward ecclesiastical and canon law materials as the origin of the procedural sense, with secular courts of probate and surrogacy adopting the term by practice rather than statute.
Bouvier's cites the Standard Dictionary for the argumentative sense, signaling that this usage was sufficiently established in general English to appear in non-legal reference works — consistent with Webster's 1913, which treats the summons and quotation senses as ordinary English with no special legal gloss.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: citation hierarchy, citation format, the treatment of secondary authority, or the distinction between mandatory and persuasive authority. These are matters the dictionaries take for granted as practitioner knowledge. For a researcher working on legal argument and brief-writing practice, the dictionaries are a starting point only.
Jurisdictional Note
The procedural cite (citation to appear) remains the standard instrument in probate and surrogate proceedings across most U.S. jurisdictions, but its form and service requirements vary by state statute. In federal practice, the term citation appears primarily in admiralty and in administrative enforcement proceedings; civil litigation uses summons.