To cite a court case, you need five pieces of information — the case name, the reporter volume, the reporter abbreviation, the first page of the opinion, and a parenthetical with the court and year — arranged according to whichever style your writing follows. That underlying content is the same whether you are learning how to cite a court case in a legal brief, a psychology paper, or a history thesis; only the punctuation, italics, and abbreviations shift between styles.
The Building Blocks of Every Citation
Before you format anything, pull the following from the opinion itself:
- The case name, with parties separated by “v.” Use only last names for individuals, and abbreviate common terms like “Corporation” or “Association.”
- The reporter citation: a volume number, an abbreviated reporter name, and the first page of the opinion. “347 U.S. 483” means volume 347 of the United States Reports, starting at page 483.
- The court, abbreviated inside the parenthetical. When the reporter already identifies the court (as “U.S.” does for the Supreme Court), the court name is dropped.
- The year of the decision, inside the same parenthetical as the court.
- Subsequent history, if the case was later reversed, affirmed, or had certiorari denied. Standard abbreviations include aff’d, rev’d, and cert. denied.
A pinpoint page comes after the first page, separated by a comma, and directs the reader to the exact language you are relying on. A full citation carrying subsequent history looks like this: Nat’l League of Cities v. Usery, 426 U.S. 833 (1976), overruled by Garcia v. San Antonio Metro. Transit Auth., 469 U.S. 528 (1985).
Where to Find the Case
The U.S. Supreme Court posts its opinions directly on its website in slip opinion form, which is later replaced by the edited version printed in the United States Reports.1Supreme Court of the United States. Opinions For other federal courts, PACER provides access to more than one billion documents. Access costs $0.10 per page, charges of $30 or less in a quarter are waived, and roughly 75 percent of users pay nothing in a given quarter.2PACER. Public Access to Court Electronic Records
Google Scholar is a free alternative covering Supreme Court, federal district and appellate, and state appellate and supreme court opinions. You can search by name, keyword, or citation, and the “How Cited” feature shows how later cases treated your case.3Library of Congress. Google Scholar – How To Find Free Case Law Online Justia and FindLaw also host free collections. Westlaw and Lexis are subscription services with editorial features like headnotes.
When you read on a screen, look for star pagination — the asterisks or bracketed markers that show where the official print page breaks fall. Pinpoint citations refer to the reporter’s page numbers, so you need those markers to cite the right page.
Bluebook Format
The Bluebook is the dominant citation system in American legal writing. It has two tracks: the Bluepages for practitioner documents like briefs and memos, and the white pages for academic legal writing like law review articles. The main difference is typographic; the structure is the same.
Basic Structure
A standard Bluebook citation has case name, reporter information, and a parenthetical containing the court and year. For a Supreme Court case:
Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803).4Legal Information Institute (LII) at Cornell Law School. William Marbury v. James Madison, Secretary of State of the United States
Because “U.S.” identifies the Supreme Court, only the year appears in the parenthetical. Federal appellate cases use the Federal Reporter (F., F.2d, or F.3d) and identify the circuit: Perry v. Schwarzenegger, 591 F.3d 1147 (9th Cir. 2010).5Justia. Kristin Perry, et al v. Arnold Schwarzenegger, et al, No. 10-15649 (9th Cir. 2010) Federal district court opinions appear in the Federal Supplement (F. Supp., F. Supp. 2d, or F. Supp. 3d), with the specific district in the parenthetical.
Bluebook requires abbreviating many common words in case names. “Association” becomes “Ass’n,” “Corporation” becomes “Corp.,” and “in the matter of” becomes “In re.” Names of individuals use last names only.
Pinpoints and Short Forms
A pinpoint points the reader to the exact page where specific language appears. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 164 (1973) sends the reader to page 164 rather than leaving them to search a 66-page opinion.
After the first full citation, subsequent references use a short form. Id. refers to the immediately preceding citation; add a page if you want a different one (Id. at 203). When the preceding citation is to a different source, use an abbreviated case name with the reporter and pinpoint page — Opticians Ass’n, 920 F.2d at 187. Pick the distinctive party name for the short form. A generic name like “United States” is useless because the reader cannot tell which case you mean.
Unpublished Opinions
Not every decision appears in an official reporter. Unpublished opinions are common in federal courts and live on Westlaw, Lexis, and Bloomberg Law. The Bluebook format uses the case name, docket number, database identifier, court, and full date:
United States v. Bennett, No. 05-CR-6050 CJS, 2005 WL 2709572 (W.D.N.Y. Oct. 21, 2005).
“WL” identifies Westlaw. A Lexis identifier would appear in its place. If the opinion is only a slip opinion with no database entry, cite by docket number and date alone.
Italics or Underlining
Case names are italicized in modern practice, both in citations and in running text. Underlining is an older typewriter-era convention that serves the same function; either is technically acceptable, but italics have become standard.
APA Format
APA style, used in psychology, education, and the social sciences, borrows the structure of legal citation and fits it into APA’s author-date framework. The reference list entry follows this pattern:
Name v. Name, Volume Reporter Page (Court Year). URL
For a Supreme Court case: Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). As with Bluebook, “Supreme Court” is dropped from the parenthetical because “U.S.” already identifies it.
For lower federal courts or state courts, spell out the court abbreviation in the parenthetical — (Tex. App. 1999) for the Texas Court of Appeals, (W.D.N.Y. 2005) for a federal district court in western New York.
One APA quirk catches almost everyone. In the reference list, the case name is not italicized. In the in-text citation, it is: (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954). That reverses the usual APA pattern, where titles are italicized in the reference list and not in the text.
MLA Format
MLA treats the case name as the title of the source. In Works Cited, the case name is italicized, followed by the reporter citation, the court, and the year. If you accessed the case through a database, the database name becomes the container, followed by the URL. In-text, you reference the case by its italicized name and add the reporter page parenthetically for direct quotations.
After the first full mention, you can shorten the case name in-text to the most distinctive party name — Shelby County v. Holder becomes Shelby. If you found the case through a secondary source such as a textbook excerpt, cite the source you actually read using “qtd. in” for quoted material, and list the secondary source in Works Cited.
Chicago Format
The Chicago Manual of Style recommends Bluebook conventions for legal citations. For audiences outside the legal field, Chicago allows a simplified footnote: case name, reporter citation, and a parenthetical with the court and year. A typical footnote reads: United States v. Christmas, 222 F.3d 141, 145 (4th Cir. 2000). Cases are usually cited only in the notes, not in the bibliography, unless a case is central to the paper’s argument.6The Chicago Manual of Style Online. Citation, Documentation of Sources #3
Medium-Neutral Citations for Certain State Courts
Traditional citations assume the reader will look up a case in a printed reporter volume. In 1996 the American Bar Association recommended a public domain citation system that works equally well in print and electronic form. Over a dozen states — Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin, and Wyoming among them — have adopted a version of it.7Cornell University Law School. Citation in Transition: From Proprietary Print Citations to Publicly Attached Vendor-Neutral Citations
A medium-neutral citation uses the year, a court abbreviation, and a sequential opinion number instead of a volume and page. A North Dakota case looks like this: Smith v. Jones, 1997 ND 15, ¶ 21, 600 N.W.2d 900. “1997 ND 15” identifies it as the fifteenth decision issued by the North Dakota Supreme Court in 1997, and “¶ 21” pinpoints a paragraph rather than a page. The regional reporter citation often follows as a parallel reference.7Cornell University Law School. Citation in Transition: From Proprietary Print Citations to Publicly Attached Vendor-Neutral Citations If you are working in one of these states, check the local court rules; they often require the medium-neutral citation as the primary reference.
Check That the Case Is Still Good Law
Once your citation is formatted, confirm that the decision has not been overturned. Citing a case that was later reversed or overruled, without noting that fact, misleads your reader and, in legal practice, can violate professional obligations. The ABA’s Model Rule 3.3 requires candor toward the tribunal; a lawyer cannot knowingly make a false statement of law or fail to correct one.8American Bar Association. Rule 3.3: Candor Toward the Tribunal
Google Scholar’s “How Cited” feature will show you subsequent cases and how they treated the opinion. Westlaw’s KeyCite and Lexis’s Shepard’s do the same work in more detail. The most common mistake is not fabrication but shortcuts: relying on a headnote summary instead of reading the opinion, copying a citation from a secondary source without verifying it, or forgetting to check whether the case is still good law. Pulling up the original opinion and confirming the page number takes an extra minute, and that minute is almost always worth it.