Provenance is not a footnote

A footnote says where something came from. A provenance record proves it. The difference matters when the reader is not a colleague but an opposing expert whose task is to find the one reference that does not hold.

What a record has to carry

Five elements, none optional: the document identifier as it appears in the disclosed record, the location inside the document, the date relied upon and which of the document’s dates it is, the custodian from whose files it was produced, and a fixity value that demonstrates the copy inspected is the copy disclosed. Remove any one of them and the citation becomes a claim about a document rather than a route to it.

Opening the source

The test is simple. Can a tribunal member, reading the report at eleven at night, open the assertion and see the passage on the page without asking anyone? If the answer is yes, the argument about the assertion can begin. If the answer is no, the argument is about the expert.