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I am the enemy of the pinpoint citation in law journals for articles. Unless directly quoting, it is often better to cite to an entire article. Pinpoint citation makes it seem as if sentences isolated from the broader argument they are part of are conclusive.
They reproduce a culture of seeking "authority" for propositions, where we are really only making our own arguments in light of ongoing intellectual conversations.
At any rate, readers should be encouraged to read the whole article cited, not just fish for tidbits that seem to validate a point.
This is really all just a weird professional distortion where legal scholars are encouraged to think as if they were writing judgments and thereby providing "authority" for arguments.
Needless to say, in the world of ideas, arguments stand or fall based on whether they hold on their little intellectual legs, not because someone has made a somewhat similar argument before giving one's own an air of plausibility
I'd have thought that this much would have been obvious to journal editors in an increasingly interdisciplinary world by now.
