Ellipses | Typography for Lawyers

ellipses

Avoid using periods and spaces

An ellipsis (plural ellipses) is a sequence of three dots used to indicate an omission in quoted material.

		Windows	Mac OS	HTML
…	ellipsis	alt 0133	option + semicolon	`…`

The ellipsis is frequently approximated by typing three periods in a row, which puts the dots too close together, or three periods with spaces in between, which puts the dots too far apart.

So use the ellipsis character, not the approximations.

from a ... to z	wrong
from a . . . to z	wrong
from a … to z	right

Should you put word spaces around an ellipsis? As with the em dash (see hyphens and dashes), that’s up to you. Typically you’ll want spaces before and after, but if that looks odd, you can take them out. If there’s text on only one side of the ellipsis, use a nonbreaking space on that side so the ellipsis doesn’t get separated from the text.

Bluebook ellipses

Bluebook rule 5.3 (20th ed. 2015) demands ellipses that look like periods with word spaces between them and around them.

imperative to . . . courts

right

The problem with using periods and word spaces is that it permits your word processor to break the ellipsis across lines or pages, like so:

imperative to . .
. courts

wrong

To keep the dots together, make a Bluebook ellipsis out of three periods with nonbreaking spaces in between. Also put nonbreaking spaces on the ends unless there’s text on both sides. This ensures that the periods behave like a single unit of punctuation.

losses at . . . banks

right

by the way

“[The Bluebook] is a monstrous growth. … I have not read the nineteenth edition. I have dipped into it, much as one might dip one’s toes in a pail of freezing water.”
—Judge Richard A. Posner, The Bluebook Blues, 120 Yale L.J. 850, 851–52 (2011).
I’ve often wondered whether the zigzagging illogic of the Bluebook is calculated to protect its franchise—after all, if legal citation were distilled to a few simple rules, no one would need the Bluebook. Its subtitle—“A Uniform System of Citation”—compresses a lot of dark humor into five words.
One problem with the Bluebook’s four-dot-sequence rules is that they use the same visual mark—four periods separated by spaces—to denote at least four distinct conditions. Namely: a deletion before a sentence-ending period (rule 5.3(b)(iii)); a sentence-ending period before a deletion (rule 5.3(b)(v)); a deletion both at the end and after the end of a sentence (rule 5.3(b)(vi)); and a deletion of one or more paragraphs (rule 5.1(a)(iii)). This invites ambiguity. When readers come upon a four-dot sequence, how do they know what it signifies? It may not be clear from context. Proper ellipses would help distinguish these conditions.