Before we get into language issues, we can recognize that this is a very courageous person who represents himself in court, even more so if that person is a prose parent, because it suggests that the case could be extremely emotionally important when it comes to child custody, financial divorce, alimony or something like that. In this case, I don`t know of any angel who wouldn`t hesitate to walk down the paved floor with questions about the italics of legal quotes, even if they were armed with excellent insurance policies. Aside from the simple fact that every detail of a legal document could mean the difference between wealth and bankruptcy, lawyers put “see,” “see also,” “for example,” etc. in italics just to separate them from the main text. Whether being in parentheses or outside makes a difference depends on the context and can change depending on a single comma or other punctuation mark, which is why lawyers in the UK despise commas and most other punctuation marks. The SE law would obviously be a better reference. Translating a “legal language” into ordinary English is almost as dangerous as translating into a completely foreign language. Would you write your petition in French and trust Google to translate it? In your example, where “the lawyers observed, blah-blah-blah (see article name), the only difference should be in style, not in any sense. It is almost certain that there is no greater difference between citing a legal decision and a peer-reviewed journal article than between articles published in material or paperback form. If so, how would you distinguish between a court decision rendered directly by a court and a review of that decision in a recognized legal journal? How would you distinguish between peer-reviewed work and pure speculation in the same journal, expert or not? If you read the document you linked to (The Indigo Book), you will see (in section R4.1) that these terms are signals that introduce quotation phrases and phrases. Section R2.1 states that signs should be italicized, presumably to alert the reader.
He adds that in the preparation of these documents, the signals were underlined using typewriters, as no other form of highlighting was generally available. In any case, what exactly does the word “quotes” bring there? .