Treatment attaches to holdings, not to cases.

The question behind every citator check is whether a case can still be relied on, and to what extent. The honest answer is often "for some of it." A single later opinion can overrule one holding of an earlier case, distinguish another and follow a third. A flag attached to the whole case collapses those into one signal and loses the information the lawyer needed.

The Case Treatment Classification Guide therefore classifies treatment along three dimensions. Scope: does the treatment reach the entire case, a specific holding, a factual application, or dicta? Severity: how much does it damage or support the cited authority? Mechanism: through what legal process does it operate, whether appellate reversal, legislative supersession or doctrinal shift? The categories that follow keep distinctions a single flag erases. Distinguished is factual and neutral; limited narrows a holding as a matter of law. Dicta cannot be overruled in the strict sense. A later case discussing the same subject has not treated an earlier one unless it substantively engages it.

Scope is not a refinement for specialists. It is where proposition-level verification begins. A brief cites a case for a proposition, and the proposition's status is what matters: the surviving portion of a partially overruled case may be perfectly citable, while the one holding a later court repudiated may be fatal even though the rest of the opinion stands. The same logic governs direction, since one opinion can hold for the defense and state the plaintiff's exception on the same page.

A treatment system that cannot say which holding it is talking about is reporting on the wrong unit of law.