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Two ways of naming the same judgment, and the bracket shape tells you which you are holding.
A neutral citation is assigned by the court — [2023] UKSC 15 — and belongs to no publisher, which is why it can locate an unreported judgment. A law report citation names a commercial series and a volume. The square brackets in either case mean the year is needed to find the volume; round brackets mean the volumes run continuously and the year is only context. Modern practice gives the neutral citation first and the report second.
Whether the year sits in square or round brackets is itself a distinction with a meaning.
Drawn from the visual attributes recorded for each symbol. Only traits the two records disagree about are listed.
| Trait | Neutral citation | Square and round brackets in a citation |
|---|---|---|
| Built from | letter like and number like | number like |
| Symmetry | none | vertical |
| Neutral citation | Square and round brackets in a citation | |
|---|---|---|
| Assigned by | The court, when judgment is handed down | Not assigned — a convention about how the year is set |
| What the brackets say | Always square: the year is part of the identifier | Square means the year is needed to find the volume; round means it is not |
| Pinpointing | By numbered paragraph, valid in any edition | By page, which is edition-specific in older reports |
| Available for | England and Wales from 2001; other jurisdictions vary | Any series, and the rule is British rather than universal |
| Relationship (from Symbolwise's records) | Commonly confused with Square and round brackets in a citation — Whether the year sits in square or round brackets is itself a distinction with a meaning. | Commonly confused with Neutral citation — Whether the year sits in square or round brackets is itself a distinction with a meaning. |
The practice directions bind citation before the courts of England and Wales. The bracket convention is a reporting practice rather than a rule, and it is not observed in American citation at all.
Practice directions on neutral citation
Courts and Tribunals Judiciary of England and Wales · retrieved 2026-08-21
Issued by the courts and binding on citation before them. Governs England and Wales; Scotland, Northern Ireland and every other jurisdiction have their own arrangements.
OSCOLA — Oxford University Standard for the Citation of Legal Authorities
University of Oxford Faculty of Law · retrieved 2026-08-21
The dominant academic citation standard in the United Kingdom. A style guide with no legal force; the courts' own practice directions govern citation in litigation.
Both are drawn as one continuous decorative stroke with a closed loop and a tail that crosses back over itself, which is why a description of the shape alone reaches both. The clef is far taller, spans a stave, and its spiral encircles one specific line — that encircled line is the note G, and it is the only reason the shape is drawn where it is.
The ampersand is a ligature of the Latin word et, still visible in some italic forms where the e and the t can be picked out. The Tironian et is a separate mark descending from a Roman shorthand, shaped like a small seven, and it is in daily public use in Ireland as the written form of 'agus'. A reader who knows only the ampersand takes the other for a numeral, which on a bilingual road sign produces a confidently wrong place name.
As punctuation the asterisk points at a footnote or marks a required field. In a filename pattern typed at a shell it matches any run of characters, including none — and the shell expands it against real filenames before the command runs, so the command never sees the pattern at all. That expansion is the part people are surprised by.
A single C in a circle asserts copyright. Two C shapes mark a Creative Commons licence — which grants specific permissions while the creator keeps their copyright. A CC badge does not put a work in the public domain, and it does not tell you what you may do on its own: the condition marks beside it carry the terms.