Legal Abbreviations

Under the heading “Things that you think people know about, but on second thought, maybe they don’t.”

Mood. / Moo. P.C. / Swab. / Dy. / Fonbl. These are all abbreviations that cause law students to give me a blank look. If your copy of Raistrick’s is not nearby; a very handy tool to quickly find out what these abbreviations stand for is the Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations. A quick search reveals what an abbreviation stands for, an alternative abbreviation and the jurisdiction in question. In many cases you can also see how many different titles use the same or similar abbreviations. Or if you have reached the citation stage of an article you are writing and you need to find a preferred abbreviation for a journal you can reverse your search and type in the title of a report or a journal in order to retrieve a preferred and alternative abbreviation.