How to in Text Cite a Legal Case

Other legislative documents such as witness statements, hearings, non-legal bills and related documents may also be cited. Your reference list templates (below) may include a URL if available, but the URL is optional. The quotations in the text follow the same patterns as court decisions and cases. If no official name of the law is available (for example, there is only one U.S. code citation), some authors only insert the legal citation into the text, for example, 18 U.S.C. § 2258, and exclude it from the bibliography. Most legal documents are cited in the Bluebook style, the style of legal citation common to all disciplines (see Bluebook style in The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, 2015). The APA departs from the bluebook style for legal documents and uses these templates and templates in bibliographies. This resource lists some of the common legal references that ABS users need to do their jobs, but is not exhaustive. Please note that legal conventions outside the United States may differ.

Pages where case information can be found online also tend to display the correct citation form for the case in question. You can check them to make sure you are using the correct abbreviations. Citations for prosecutions refer to journalists, with publications documenting cases. To cite a case or court decision, indicate the name of the case, the volume and short name of the journalist, the page number, the name of the court, the year and, optionally, the URL. The APA bases its citations for legal and legal affairs on The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (18th edition, 2005). Please refer to Appendix 7.1 Reference to Legal Documents in the American Psychological Association Publication Manual, 6th Edition, for a full discussion of citing legal documents. Patents are cited more as traditional sources of APA. In this BC Supreme Court case, Rutledge v Jimmie is the case name, 2014 is the year of the decision, BCSC is the court identifier and 41 is the case number. Examples of federal court proceedings can be found on page 217 of the American Psychological Association Publication Manual, 6th edition. You don`t need to create a citation for entire federal or state constitutions. It is enough to refer to them by their name in the text.

When citing specific articles and edits, create reference list entries and citations in the text as usual. The United States Constitution should be included in the reference lists and brackets of the U.S. Const. can be used. Use state legal abbreviations for state constitutions, such as In. Const. for the Indiana Constitution. In the story, write these place names: USA, USA, Indiana. Follow the Constitution numbering pattern (Roman for articles and amendments of the United States Constitution and for articles of the State Constitution, but Arabic for state amendments).

The name of the case is italicized in the citation in the text, but not in the list of references. In the reference, enter a single page number – the page where coverage of this case begins – instead of a full range of pages. Most words are abbreviated in legal citations. This means that there are a very large number of standard abbreviations. Check out resources like this page to familiarize yourself with common abbreviations. R v Chaisson is the name of the case, [2006] is the year of publication and must be in square brackets, because Volume 1 does not clearly identify the book, SCR for Supreme Court Reports, the case begins at page 415. Quotations in parentheses and narrative citations in the text are formatted in the same way as any other source (first item in the reference list entry, year), although, unlike other sources, court decisions and cases italicize the title in the citation in the text. For example (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954). The APA-style blog emphasizes italicizing the case name for the citation in the text. For APA legal citations, it is recommended to cite all journalists (publications that report cases) in which a court case appears.

To quote multiple journalists, simply separate them with commas in your reference entry. This is called parallel citation. R v Latimer is the name of the case, 1995 is the year of the decision, volume 126 clearly indicates the exact volume, so the year does not need to be bracketed, DLR for Dominion Law Reports, 4th series, page 203 case, as heard by the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal, which is abbreviated to Sask CA. If you are citing a recent court case in the APA style that has not yet been printed and therefore does not have a specific page number, add a series of three underscores (___) where the page number would normally appear: The citations in the text are formatted in the same way as the above court decisions (name of the act, year). The years can be confusing because laws are often passed in a different year than the one they are published; You should always use the year of publication of the law in the compilation you are considering. Do not repeat the name of the case, court or year. Simply indicate the volume, journalist and page number of each quote. For example, APA-style legal citations (e.g., lawsuits, laws) are slightly different from other APA-style citations. They usually don`t list authors, and abbreviations are used to make them more concise. This template follows this list of items at the beginning of this section in its entirety, as the cited journalist, the Federal Reporter, publishes the decisions of various U.S. district courts. F., F.2d and F.3d in the above model indicate the journalist and his later series.

Note that âv.â (for âversusâ) is used between the names of the parties in the title of a case, although APA âvs. â outside the context of legal subpoenas. The 6th edition of the American Psychological Association Publication Manual (2010) describes the citation style of legal documents in the appendix to Chapter 7 (pp. 216-224). For court decisions, laws, codes and other legal publications, the APA uses the formats described in The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation. Below are suggested formats for common types of legal publications (California and state sources). A neutral quote makes it possible to identify a case independently of a print journalist. The courts give the neutral citation when they make a decision. The implementation date of the neutral citation standard varies from court to court in British Columbia.

In January 1999, the Court of Appeal was the first court in British Columbia to apply the neutral citation standard for judgments in electronic form. The Canadian Uniform Legal Reference Guide, 9th Edition, 2018 (also known as the “McGill Guide”) lists the implementation date for each tribunal in Appendix B-3. The Supreme Court is the highest federal court, and its decisions are reflected in the United States Reports (referred to in the reference as the “U.S.” in the reference). You do not need to indicate the court in parentheses in this case, because the name of the journalist already makes this clear. If you are quoting a print legal journalist, the traditional form of legal citation requires the following: This recent appeal in the Latimer case has a parallel neutral quote. The journalist`s printed quote follows the neutral quote. Note that the comma in the quote to the printed journalist comes immediately after the neutral quote and not after the journalist`s year. No, specifying a URL is optional in APA-style reference entries for law sources (e.g., lawsuits, laws). It may be useful to do this to help the reader retrieve the source, but it is not necessary because the other information contained should be enough to find it.

If you cannot identify the official abbreviation of the issuing court, some instructors prefer that you shorten it or ignore it yourself. In any case, be sure to specify the year. Federal court proceedings are those that take place at the national level in the United States – in the U.S. Supreme Court, district court, or district court. State courts are those that operate in specific states rather than at the federal level. The two frequently cited types of state courts are supreme courts and courts of appeal. Both are cited in a similar format. These documents include rules, regulations, decrees and expert opinions. Their citation patterns in the text follow typical APA patterns: (first item of reference list entry, year) without italics.

If the name of the law is not available, some authors insert the legal citation only in parentheses of the text – for example (18 U.S.C. § 2258) – but exclude the source of the bibliography. The APA prefers to identify the name of the law and, if possible, include an entry in the reference list. The court assigns the neutral quote when the decision is made, so a very recent case will only have a neutral quote until it is included in a print journalist. If only the neutral citation is available, it can be used alone: A7.03 Court decisions (Bluebook Rule 10) In the text, indicate the name of the case (italics) and the year of the decision. If two or more years are given, also quote those years. Court proceedings often span several years, each reflecting a particular stage in the history of the case. Giving a single date could give the impression that only one point in the history of the case is being cited, or mislead the reader about the time of the case.

Case reference form: name v. name, volume source page (hearing date). Citation (in law, this means the scope and page in journalists or books where case decisions are published) Case law is a law established by a court decision in cases. The SCR (Supreme Court Reports of Canada) uses square brackets. Place the comma before the date of the tape. Do not put the court abbreviation (CSC) at the end of the quote, as the name of the court is included in the journalist`s name. The decisions of the U.S. District Courts are reported in the Federal Reporter. This journalist has appeared in three series; the first is abbreviated to “F.”, the second to “F.2d” and the third and current series to “F.3d”.