The impossible pinpoint, explained.

The rule

Brown v. Board of Educ., 347 U.S. 483 (1954) begins at page 483 of volume 347. A later sentence citing Brown, 347 U.S. at 12 points at a page hundreds of pages before the opinion starts. Nothing outside the brief is needed to see the contradiction: the brief supplied both numbers itself. That is what makes the finding impossible rather than merely doubtful, and it is why this check can run entirely on your machine, with nothing uploaded.

Where it hides

The defect rarely sits in the full citation, where the two numbers are side by side. It hides in the places a brief talks about a case after introducing it:

• A short form: Brown, 347 U.S. at 12, three pages after the full cite.
• An Id. chain: Id. at 12 inherits its authority from whatever came before, and the pinpoint must still fall inside that opinion.
• A supra reference carrying its own pinpoint.
• A parallel reporter: each reporter starts the opinion on its own first page, so a pinpoint into a parallel citation is checked against that reporter's own first page, not the lead one's.

citefold runs the rule on all four, because it first ties every short form back to the full citation it shortens; a short form that cannot be tied to any authority is reported separately, as unresolved, with its text, so a person decides.

What a finding looks like

The report's verdict line counts what was found: 1 impossible, 1 unresolved, across 3 authorities. Each finding is a card with the reason in plain words and the cited text with its paragraph number, and Show it in the brief opens the paragraph with the cite marked in place, so you read the sentence the finding is about. The guide walks the whole report; Try the worked example, on the checker itself, runs a five-paragraph passage with one defect of each kind so you can see a finding before committing a filing of your own.

What it is not

An impossible pinpoint is a defect in the brief; fix the citation. It says nothing about whether the case exists in an external database, is good law, or supports the proposition: citefold does not check any of that, and its report says so every time. What it proves, it proves from the brief alone.

Check a filing

Open the checker and drop a .docx; it is read in your browser and never uploaded. Free for filings citing up to 15 authorities; $79 once for any size. The habit in full: cite-check a brief without uploading it.