United States
Case Citation
Guide, Rules and ProtocolThe standard case citation format
in the United States is:
-
Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).
where:
- Roe v. Wade is the abbreviated name of the case, (the
first name
Roe
is the name of the
plaintiff, who is the party who filed the suit for an original
case, or the
appellant, the party appealing in a case being appealed from a
lower court; and
Wade is the name of the
defendant, the party responding to the suit, or the
appellee, the party responding to the appeal.)
- 410 is the volume number of the "reporter"
in which the Court's written opinion in the Roe v. Wade is
published,
- U.S. is the abbreviation of the reporter, here "U.S." stands for
United States Reports,
- 113 is the page number (in volume 410 of United States
Reports) where the opinion begins, and
- 1973 is the year in which the court rendered its decision.
These numbers are used to find a particular case, both when looking
up a case in a reporter and when accessing it electronically on the
Internet or through LexisNexis or Westlaw.
This format also allows different cases with the same parties to be
easily differentiated. For example, looking for the
U.S. Supreme Court case of
Miller v. California would yield four cases, some involving
different people named Miller, and each involving different issues.
United States Supreme Court
Cases from the
Supreme Court of the United States are officially printed in the
United States Reports. A citation to the United States
Reports looks like this:
Many court decisions are published by more than one reporter. A
citation to two or more reporters for a given court decision is called
a "parallel citation". For U.S. Supreme Court decisions, there are
several unofficial reporters, including the Supreme Court Reporter
(S. Ct.) and U.S. Reports, Lawyer's Edition (commonly known
simply as the Lawyer's Edition) (L. Ed.), which are printed by
private companies and provide further annotations to the opinions of
the Court. Although a citation to the latter two is not required, some
attorneys and legal writers prefer to cite all three case reporters at
once:
The "2d" after the L. Ed. signifies the second series of the
Lawyers' Edition. United States case reporters are sequentially
numbered, but the volume number is never higher than 999. When the
1,000th volume is reached (the threshold in earlier years was lower),
the volume number is reset to 1 and a "2d" is appended after the
reporter's abbreviation (American lawyers have a tradition of using
"2d" and "3d" rather than "2nd" and "3rd"). Some case reporters are in
their third series, and a few are approaching their fourth.
Some very old Supreme Court cases have odd-looking citations, such
as
Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137 (1803). The "(1
Cranch)" refers to the fact that, before there was a reporter series
known as the United States Reports compiled by the Supreme
Court's
Reporter of Decisions, cases were gathered, bound together, and
sold by private individuals who had contracted with the Court for the
right to do so. In this case, the case was first reported in an
edition by
William Cranch, who was responsible for publishing Supreme Court
reports from 1801 to 1815. Such reports, named for the individual who
gathered them and hence called "nominative reports," existed from 1790
to 1874.
When a case has been decided, but not yet published in the case
reporter, the citation may note the volume but leave blank the page of
the case reporter until it is determined. For example,
Bowles v. Russell, 551 U.S. ___ (2007).
See the
Supreme Court of the United States Reporter of Decisions for other
edition names.
In the caption of a Supreme Court case, the first name listed is
the name of the appealing party, followed by the party responding to
the appeal. In most cases, the appealing party was the losing party in
the prior court. This is the same practice used in cases in the
federal courts of appeal
Lower federal courts
United States court of appeals cases are published in the
Federal Reporter (F., F.2d, or F.3d).
United States district court cases and cases from some specialized
courts are published in the
Federal Supplement (F. Supp. or F. Supp. 2d). Both are
published by
Thomson West; they are technically unofficial reporters, but have
become widely accepted as the de facto "official" reporters of
the lower federal courts because of the absence of a true official
reporter. (Of the federal appeals and district courts, only one, the
D.C. Circuit, has an official reporter, and even that one is
rarely used today.)
When lower federal court opinions are cited, the citation includes
the name of the court. This is placed in the parentheses immediately
before the year. Some examples:
State courts
State court decisions are published in several places. Many states
have their own official state reporter, which publishes decisions of
that state's highest court. These reporters have the same abbreviation
(note: this is the traditional abbreviation, not the postal
abbreviation) as that of the state's name, regardless of what the
actual title of the reporter is. Thus, California Official Reports
is abbreviated "Cal.".
In addition to the official reporters,
Thomson West publishes several series of "regional reporters"
which cover several states each. These are the North Eastern
Reporter, Atlantic Reporter, South Eastern Reporter,
Southern Reporter, South Western Reporter, North
Western Reporter, and Pacific Reporter.
California,
Illinois, and
New
York also each have their own line of West reporters, because of
the large volume of cases generated in those states. Some smaller
states (like
South Dakota) have stopped publishing their own official
reporters, and instead have certified the appropriate West regional
reporter as their "official" reporter.
Here are some examples of how to cite West reporters:
-
Jackson v. Commonwealth, 583 S.E.2d 780 (Va. Ct. App. 2003)
- a case in the Virginia Court of Appeals (an intermediate appellate
court) published in the South Eastern Reporter
-
Foxworth v. Maddox, 137 So. 161 (Fla. 1931) - a case in the
Florida Supreme Court published in the Southern Reporter
-
People v. Brown, 282 N.Y.S.2d 497 (1967) - a case in the
New York Court of Appeals (New York's highest court) published
in the New York Supplement. The case also appears in West's
regional reporter: People v. Brown, 229 N.E.2d 192 (N.Y.
1967).
Abbreviations for lower courts vary by state, as each state has its
own system of trial courts and intermediate appellate courts.
When a case appears in both an official reporter and a regional
reporter, either citation can be used. Many lawyers prefer to include
both citations. Some state courts require that parallel citations (in
this case, citing to both the official reporter and an unofficial
regional reporter) be used when citing cases from any court in that
state's system.
Some states, notably
California and
New
York, have their own citation systems that differ significantly
from the various federal and national standards. Citations in
California style put the year between the names of the parties
and the reference to the case reporter. Citations in New York style
wrap the year in brackets instead of parentheses. Both New York and
California wrap an entire citation in parentheses when it is used as a
stand-alone sentence. New York puts the terminating period outside the
parentheses, but California puts it inside. New York wraps just the
reporter and page references in parentheses when the citation is used
as a clause.
Either way, both state styles differ from the national/Bluebook
style of simply dropping in the citation as a separate sentence
without further adornment. Both systems use less punctuation and
spacing in their reporter abbreviations.
For example, assuming that it is being placed as a stand-alone
sentence, the Brown case above would be cited (using the
official reporter) to a New York court as:
And, again, as a stand-alone sentence, the famous Greenman
product liability case would be cited to a California court as:
Like the United States Supreme Court, some very old state case
citations include an abbreviation of the name of either the private
publisher or a state-appointed officer who collected the cases. For
example, the citation in
Pierson v. Post, 3 Cai. R. 175 (1804), is an abbreviation for
volume 3 of Caines' Reports, page 175, named for
George Caines, who had been appointed to report New York cases.
Most states gave up this practice in the mid- to late-1800s, but
Delaware persisted until 1920.
Unpublished decisions
A growing number of court decisions are not published in case
reporters. For example, only 7% of the opinions of the California
intermediate courts (the
Courts of Appeal) are published each year. This is mainly because
the editors of reports choose only significant decisions for
publication, due to the cost of publishing and the importance of
avoiding information overload. It is also argued that this is in part
because in many states, especially California, the legislature has
failed to expand the judiciary to keep up with population growth (for
various political and fiscal reasons). To deal with their crushing
caseloads, many judges prefer to write shorter-than-normal opinions
that dispose of minor issues in the case in a sentence or two. They
avoid publishing such abbreviated opinions, however, so as not to risk
creating bad
precedents.
Attorneys have several options in citing "unpublished" decisions:
- For recently-decided cases which will eventually be published,
the docket number from the court can be used as a citation. The same
method is used when drafting appeals to refer to prior case history
from lower courts.
- Cases which are intentionally left officially unpublished are
nonetheless often "published" on computer services, such as
LexisNexis and
Westlaw. These services have their own citation formats based on
serial numbers (issued sequentially from 1 as documents are added to
the database each year). A Westlaw citation looks like this:
Fuqua Homes, Inc. v. Beattie, No. 03-3587, 2004 WL 2495842
(8th Cir. Nov. 8, 2004).
Some court systems—such as the California state court system and
the federal Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit—forbid attorneys to
cite unpublished cases as precedent. Since 2004, federal judges have
been debating whether the
Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure (FRAP) should be amended so
that unpublished cases in all circuits can be cited as precedent. In
2006, the Supreme Court, over the objection of several hundred judges
and lawyers, adopted a new Rule 32.1 of FRAP requiring that federal
courts allow citation of unpublished cases. The rule took effect on
January 1, 2007.[5]
Vendor-neutral citations
With the rise of the web, many courts placed new cases on websites.
Some were published while others never lost their "unpublished"
status. The major legal citation systems required cites to the
officially published page numbers, in which publishers such as
West Publishing claimed a copyright interest. (In view of the
decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in
Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service, that the mere
alphabetical listing of telephone subscribers was an inadequate amount
of effort to be valid to obtain copyright, the claim of copyright on
page numbering of court decisions is probably not valid.)
A vendor-neutral citation movement[6]
led to provisions being made for citations to web-based cases and
other legal materials. A few courts modified their rules to
specifically take into account cases "published" on the web.
Pinpoint citations
In practice, most lawyers go one step farther, once they have
developed the correct citation for a case using the rules discussed
above. Most court opinions contain holdings on multiple issues, so
lawyers need to cite to the page that contains the specific holding
they wish to invoke in their own case. Such citations are known as
pinpoint citations, "pin cites," or "jump cites."
For example, in Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court held
that the word "person" as used in the Fourteenth Amendment does not
include the unborn. That particular holding appears on page 158 of the
volume in which the Roe decision was published. A full pin cite
to Roe for that holding would be as follows:
And a parallel cite to all three U.S. Supreme Court reporters,
combined with pin cites for all three, would produce:
-
Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 158, 93 S. Ct. 705, 729, 35 L.
Ed. 2d 147, 180 (1973).
But in its opinions, the Court usually provides a direct pin cite
only to the official reporter:
-
Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 158, 93 S. Ct. 705, 35 L. Ed. 2d
147 (1973).
Even then, such citations are still quite lengthy, and obviously
look quite mysterious and intimidating to laypersons when they try to
read court opinions. Since the 1980s, there has been an ongoing debate
among American judges as to whether they should relegate such lengthy
citations to footnotes to improve the readability of their opinions,
as strongly urged by
Bryan Garner, one of the leading authors on legal writing style
issues. Most judges do relegate some citations to footnotes
(though the refusal of jurists such as Justice
Stephen Breyer and Judge
Richard Posner to use footnotes in their opinions is well-known).
Types of citations
There are two types of citations: proprietary and
public domain citations. There are many citation guides; the most
commonly acknowledged is called the
Bluebook, published by students at several eminent
law schools, namely Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law
Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review and Yale
Law Journal. The
ALWD Citation Manual is a recent (as
of 2004) publication that is quickly winning supporters. Public
domain citations are those which usually refer to the official
reporters and not some kind of publication service such as
Westlaw
or
LexisNexis or some particular legal journal or specialization
specific reporter.
States with their own unique style for court documents and case
opinions also publish their own style guides which include information
on their citation rules.
External links
Law By State
See also
References
External links
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_citation
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