The ALWD Guide to Legal Citation is a citation manual, now in its seventh edition, that gives law students, attorneys, and judges one consistent set of rules for citing cases, statutes, secondary sources, and electronic materials. It is authored by Carolyn V. Williams, published by Aspen Publishing, and produced by the Association of Legal Writing Directors. Its defining feature is a single format that applies whether you are writing a law review article or a brief filed in federal court.
What the Current Edition Covers
The seventh edition, released in 2021, expanded coverage of electronic sources and updated citation formats to match how legal research actually happens. It added rules for citing Zoom interviews, electronic case file (ECF) numbers used in e-filing, and specific database identifiers, so you would cite “Westlaw Edge” rather than just “Westlaw” if that is what you used.1Aspen Publishing. ALWD Guide to Legal Citation, Seventh Edition
The chapters move from foundational principles to specific source types. “Fast Format” pages at the start of commonly used chapters give a quick-reference template for frequent citation patterns, and color-coded diagrams break sample citations into their component pieces. Sidebars flag common mistakes. Two appendices, covering local court citation rules and periodical titles, are available free online so they can be updated between print editions.
How It Compares to The Bluebook
The most important structural difference is that the ALWD Guide uses one set of rules for all documents. The Bluebook maintains separate formatting conventions for practitioners who file documents in court and academics who write for law reviews, which means learning two parallel systems inside the same manual.
In practice, the two systems produce very similar citations for most sources, and courts generally accept either format. The seventh edition deliberately aligned many rules with traditional Bluebook conventions. Several concrete differences remain:
- ALWD spells out full periodical titles; The Bluebook abbreviates them heavily using its tables.
- ALWD calls for full first names in secondary source citations; The Bluebook sometimes allows initials with last names in academic work.
- A handful of reporters use different abbreviations. ALWD uses “S.” and “S.2d” for the Southern Reporter; The Bluebook uses “So.” and “So. 2d.”
- ALWD includes appendices covering official primary sources and court-mandated citation rules for every state. The Bluebook has no direct equivalent.
Your law school’s writing program will dictate which manual you learn first. The core logic is the same in both.
Citing Cases
A complete case citation needs five pieces of information from the opinion itself: the party names, the volume and reporter where the case is published, the page number where the opinion starts, and a parenthetical identifying the court and year. The pieces assemble in that order. A U.S. Supreme Court case looks like this: Smith v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397 (2018). For lower federal courts, the parenthetical identifies the court because the reporter covers several: Anderson v. City of Chicago, 481 F.3d 315 (7th Cir. 2017).
Case names are italicized (the preferred convention) or underlined, but the comma after the case name is not italicized. To point the reader to a specific passage, add a pincite after the starting page, separated by a comma: Smith v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397, 399–400 (2018). When both pages of a range fall in the same hundred, the ALWD Guide abbreviates the second number, so pages 317 through 318 become “317–18.”2College of DuPage Library. ALWD Federal Citation Formats
How aggressively you abbreviate a case name depends on where it appears. When the case name is woven into a sentence of your text, you abbreviate only a short list of words: “and” becomes “&,” and eight common business terms like “Corporation” (Corp.), “Company” (Co.), and “Incorporated” (Inc.) are shortened. Everything else is spelled out. When the case name appears only in a standalone citation sentence or clause, you abbreviate far more aggressively using the manual’s appendix of several hundred common words.3Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute. Basic Legal Citation – Words Abbreviated in Case Names
A few other rules keep case names clean. If an organization is widely known by its initials, like ACLU or NAACP, you can substitute those for the full name. If a party name includes two business designations, drop the second one. And when choosing between a period-based abbreviation and an apostrophe contraction (Assn. versus Ass’n), the ALWD Guide prefers the abbreviation.
Citing Statutes
Statutory citations have a simpler structure than case citations but require close attention to the code’s own numbering. For a federal statute in the United States Code, the citation leads with the title number, followed by “U.S.C.,” the section symbol (§), and the section number. A parenthetical gives the year of the code edition or its most recent supplement: 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (2018).4Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute. ALWD Guide to Legal Citation – How to Cite Constitutions, Statutes, and Similar Materials
State statutes follow the same basic pattern but typically lead with the abbreviated code name rather than a title number. Format varies with how each state organizes its code. A California statute might appear as: Cal. Penal Code § 187 (West 2014). The appendices in the ALWD Guide provide the correct abbreviation and format for each state, which saves guesswork since no two states organize their statutes identically.
Short Form Citations
Once you have given a full citation, later references use a shortened form. Which short form you use depends on how recently you cited the source.
If your citation refers to the exact same authority as the one immediately before it, use Id. (italicized, with a period). To point to a different page in the same source, add “at” and the new page: Id. at 203. This works for cases, statutes, books, and articles alike.5Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute. Basic Legal Citation – Short Forms
When other citations have intervened and Id. no longer works, use a longer short form. For cases, include a recognizable piece of the case name, the volume, reporter, and the word “at” followed by the pincite: Brown, 291 U.S. at 203. For books and journal articles, the author’s last name followed by supra does the job: Abraham, supra at 390. One caution: do not use a government agency name or other generic litigant as your short form case name, because it will not help the reader identify which case you mean.
Introductory Signals
A citation does not always stand for the proposition “this source says exactly what I just wrote.” Introductory signals are single words or short phrases placed before a citation to tell the reader what relationship the cited authority has to your statement. Using them incorrectly can misrepresent how much support you actually have.
The signals fall into four groups. Support signals indicate the source backs your point: no signal at all means the source directly states your proposition, see means it supports the point implicitly or through dicta, and accord adds a second jurisdiction reaching the same conclusion. Comparison signals like compare … with invite the reader to draw a conclusion from contrasting authorities. Contradiction signals such as contra and but see flag sources that cut against your position, which honest legal writing requires. And see generally points toward useful background material without claiming direct support.6Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute. Basic Legal Citation – Signals
When a signal introduces a citation, it is italicized. Combining a signal with “e.g.,” (as in see, e.g.,) tells the reader the cited source is one representative example of several. New legal writers often list everything they found instead of choosing a representative example and using this construction.
Citing Secondary Sources
Books and Journal Articles
Secondary sources have their own format. The author’s full name comes first, followed by the title in italics. For journal articles, you then provide the volume number, the full periodical name, the starting page, and the publication year in parentheses. This is one area where the ALWD Guide is visibly different from The Bluebook, which uses abbreviated periodical names.
Book citations add the edition number and publisher’s name so the reader can locate the exact version you relied on. If the book has an editor rather than or in addition to an author, the editor’s name appears with the designation “ed.” in the parenthetical alongside the edition and year. These details matter because legal treatises are updated frequently, and a rule stated in the third edition may not appear in the fifth.
Internet and Electronic Sources
The ALWD Guide treats print sources as the default. If a source exists in traditional printed form, cite the print version. When a source exists only online, or you accessed a digital copy that is authenticated or identical to the print version, cite the electronic version directly. Internet citations include the same identifying information you would use for the source type (author, title, date) plus the URL. If a page number is a fixed feature of the document, as with a PDF, you can provide a pincite; for dynamic web pages where content shifts, you cannot.
One requirement in the seventh edition catches people off guard: when available, include a Perma.cc link, DOI, or link to an archived copy after the original URL. A date is also required. If the date on the page clearly refers to the cited material, use that date; otherwise, use a “last visited” date in the parenthetical.
Explanatory Parentheticals
Sometimes a bare citation is not enough context. Explanatory parentheticals are short descriptions placed at the end of a citation to tell the reader why the source matters or what it says. They typically begin with a present participle and are not capitalized: (holding that warrantless searches of cell phones violate the Fourth Amendment). If the parenthetical is a direct quote of one or more full sentences, capitalize the first word and include closing punctuation inside the parenthetical.
Placement order within a citation string is more rigid than most writers realize. Weight-of-authority parentheticals like (per curiam) or (Scalia, J., dissenting) come first, followed by the explanatory parenthetical, followed by any subsequent history. Scrambling this order is a common mistake in student writing.
Check Local Court Rules Before You File
Many courts have their own citation preferences that override the general rules in any national manual. Some jurisdictions require parallel citations to both official and unofficial reporters. Others restrict or prohibit citation to unpublished opinions. Before filing anything, check the relevant court’s current rules. State court citation conventions may not carry over to federal courts sitting in the same state, and pasting citations from judicial opinions into your own brief will almost certainly produce inconsistent formatting.7ALWD Guide to Legal Citation. Appendix 2 Local Court Citation Rules
Appendix 2 in the ALWD Guide covers those local rules, and Appendix 5 covers periodical titles. Both are available online for free and are updated between print editions. Because courts revise their local rules frequently, checking the online version rather than the printed page is worth the extra step.