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The Bluebook style guide is used in the American legal profession for citation of all relevant sources. Additionally, the Chicago Manual of Style recommends its use for all citation of legal material. What follows is a summary of the basics. It should be noted that the Bluebook system goes into significant complexity on most of these points, but the following is the level of detail it recommends for the basic needs of, e.g., a student.
It should also be noted that, depending on the document, underlines may be substituted for italics and vice versa – as long as one is consistent.
Once you have cited a given authority in full once, you may use a short-form citation subsequently. The specific content of a short form citation is flexible, but varies by the type of authority being cited. Acceptable short forms for a given citation will be covered in each entry.
Short forms may also use id. to indicate that this citation is from the same authority as the previous.
Citation of a court case requires the following components:
The citation may be followed by other parenthetical information, such as a brief explanation of the case’s relevance or a quotation from that case. This may be followed by subsequent history of the case, e.g., later affirmations of the decision, if you so choose.
In citing the name of the case, one generally summarizes. If there are multiple plaintiffs or multiple defendants, one only lists the first party in each category. Moreover, the names of individuals within the case name are shortened to surname only – no first or middle names, no initials, no “aka” or “et al.”
In general, one should abbreviate to the degree possible without losing necessary information. The Bluebook recommends, for example, shortening any procedural phrases to abbreviations such as “In re” or “Ex parte”, as well as using any commonly-understood abbreviations to shorten the names of the parties, e.g. “Univ.” rather than “University”. Names of the source and the court are also generally abbreviated; in the example citation below, Federal Rules Decisionsis shortened to “F.R.D.”, and the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania is abbreviated to “W.D. Pa.” Sources and courts tend to have official abbreviations for this purpose, which are generally conspicuously provided for anyone needing to cite them.
The page number in a case citation is the page on which that case begins in the source. If you wish to reference a specific page as well as the general case, separate that page reference with a comma. For instance, if your reference is a case that begins on page 100 of your source, but you want to point specifically to a statement six pages in, the page number in your citation would be “100, 106”.
Case Name , Source page number (Court year) (additional information as needed).United States ex rel. Gerald Mayo v. Satan and His Staff , 54 F.R.D. 282 (W.D. Pa. 1971) (“the plaintiff has failed to include with his complaint the required form of instructions for the United StatesMarshal for directions as to service of process”).
In the short-form citation of a case, you are free to shorten the case name to only the first party, or even an abbreviated form of that party’s title. If, however, the first party is a governmental entity, geographical unit, or other such creation, this may not be a helpful citation. (Since there are so many cases where the first party is, for example, the U.S. government, citing a case name as “United States” doesn’t narrow it down enough to be useful). In these cases, cite instead by the name of the second party.
If you are citing a specific point in the case, you may use only that page number and eliminate the page that the case begins on. If you are still citing the case as a whole, retain the page number on which the case begins.
Shortened Case Name , Source at page number.
Ex rel. Mayo , 54 F.R.D. at 282.
When citing the constitution of a governmental entity, use the abbreviated title of the constitution, then specify to which subdivision of said document you are referring. Some helpful abbreviations for those subdivisions are as follows: