1Your First Case Citation

You have read a judicial opinion and want to tell a reader where a particular conclusion appears. The browser shows a case name, several citation numbers, and a PDF page counter. Which numbers belong in the citation? Begin with one verified authority and one narrow proposition. In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court concluded that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. The relevant conclusion appears on page 495 of the United States Reports, although the opinion begins on page 483.

Identify a case as a judicial source; distinguish the opinion's first page from the page supporting your sentence; assemble a full citation; determine whether the reporter identifies the court; and check both the source's identity and the support for your proposition. You can do these tasks using the supplied source information without a paid database.

A legal citation is a set of instructions for finding an authority and a representation about why it appears in your document. Its numbers do different jobs. Some identify the source; others locate the passage. Formatting those numbers correctly does not establish that the passage supports what you wrote. Keep those two questions separate from your first attempt.

Our model sentence is deliberately narrow: The Supreme Court concluded that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Brown v. Bd. of Educ., 347 U.S. 483, 495 (1954). The sentence reports a conclusion of the 1954 opinion. It does not attempt to summarize every part of equal-protection law, every remedy, or subsequent litigation. The citation needs to support the sentence actually on the page.

The full citation begins with the case name. The name is italicized; the comma after it is roman. The word Board is abbreviated to Bd. and Education to Educ. in this citation sentence. The rule for names used as part of ordinary prose is more restrained, as Chapter 5 explains. Here the citation stands apart from the sentence it supports, so the more extensive citation-name abbreviations apply.

The number 347 identifies the reporter volume. U.S. is the abbreviation for United States Reports. The number 483 is the first page of this decision in that volume. Together, 347 U.S. 483 identifies the reported decision. The next number, 495, is the pinpoint. It tells the reader where to find the conclusion supporting the preceding sentence. The year 1954 identifies the year of the decision, not the year you downloaded it.

There is no additional court abbreviation in the parenthetical. United States Reports unambiguously identifies the Supreme Court of the United States. A reporter that contains decisions from several courts will require more information. A citation ending (9th Cir. 2013), for example, would identify a federal court of appeals and the decision year. A federal appellate reporter does not by itself identify which circuit decided a case.

Brown v. Bd. of Educ., 347 U.S. 483, 495 (1954).

The exact judicial sentence supplied for this lesson is: “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” It appears within the Court's conclusion about segregation in public education. That context matters. A citation to the sentence does not justify changing its subject to every form of separate facility in every setting. The ledger identifies this as real example EX-001, a historical teaching demonstration checked through CourtListener's opinion text and reporter pagination.

Start a source card before formatting. Record the full title as you found it, deciding court, decision date, reporter citation, first page, precise supporting location, and a stable access link. Copy the needed passage with enough surrounding text to understand its subject and limitations. Record separately the sentence you intend to support. You now have information against which to check your citation rather than a citation assembled from memory.

Next choose the source form. A judicial opinion is normally cited as a case even when you read it online. Finding Brown on a website does not make the website itself the legal authority. The site's delivery method can be useful in research notes, but the opinion's stable reporter citation supplies the identification in this model.

Build the citation from the source card. Apply name abbreviations, insert reporter information, add the pinpoint, and finish the court/year parenthetical. Then reopen the source using the citation you built. If the citation points to a different decision or cannot lead you to the passage, the formatting work has failed a practical test. Finally compare the passage with your sentence word by word. Pay attention to subjects, conditions, exceptions, and strength of language.

This routine also guards against copying a publisher's headnote. A headnote may summarize the decision, but it is a different text from the court's opinion. Locate the court's own passage before treating language as the court's words. The model quotation here comes from the opinion, not a commercial editorial summary.

Suppose your notes contain 347 U.S. 495 because you wrote down only the page of the important sentence. That combination points to page 495 as though it were the beginning of a case. Repair it by restoring the first page: 347 U.S. 483, 495. The first number finds the opinion; the second finds your passage. Both are needed for this full citation.

Suppose instead that you copied the PDF viewer's page 13. That may be the thirteenth image in a file, including a cover or syllabus. It is not automatically reporter page 13. Use the printed or preserved reporter pagination. An electronic copy can contain star-pagination markers such as *495; those indicate the original reporter page. The asterisk's role depends on the source format. It does not mean every citation to an online opinion needs a star-page pinpoint.

Do not italicize the entire citation. Italicize the case name while leaving reporter numbers, reporter abbreviation, pinpoint, and year roman. Do not add U.S. Supreme Court to the year parenthetical when U.S. already identifies that court. Do not cite page 483 for a proposition you checked only at 495. Do not let a citation to one famous sentence stand for a claim about an entire area of law. A narrow supported sentence is more useful than a broad confident one with an impressive case name attached.

A conventional reported-case full citation supplies the name, volume, reporter, first page, pinpoint when supporting a particular passage, and necessary court/year information. A first page identifies; a pinpoint locates. The deciding court may be omitted only when the citation otherwise identifies it unambiguously. The retrieval date belongs in your research record, not in place of the decision year. A source match, a passage check, and a current-validity investigation are different checks.

The first useful research record is small enough to complete while the source is open. Give it five fields: identity, version, location, proposition, and limit. Identity records the case name, reporter volume, reporter abbreviation, first page, court, and year. Version records which copy you inspected. Location records the reporter page you actually read. Proposition records what that passage establishes in your own words. Limit records what your check does not establish. These fields support different decisions; do not collapse them into a single pasted citation.

For the Brown demonstration, identity is the full case citation supplied in this chapter. The inspected electronic opinion is the version used for the demonstration. The relevant reporter location is 495. The proposition concerns the Court's conclusion about separate educational facilities in public education. The limit is equally concrete: inspecting this historical conclusion does not establish how every later court applied Brown, the outcome of a contemporary dispute, or the result of a commercial citator search. A reliable source card makes those boundaries visible before the case enters your paragraph.

Now place the source card beside the sentence you plan to write. If the sentence describes the historical conclusion, the fit is close. If the sentence describes a present-day school's liability, the fit is incomplete. That second sentence needs additional legal analysis and sources. You may still use Brown, but you cannot make the historical pinpoint perform every job in the new sentence. This is why a beginner should check the proposition before polishing the citation. An immaculate citation attached to an unsupported claim can survive a visual proofread.

The card also prevents three common transcription mistakes. First, it separates the first page from the page containing the relevant passage. Second, it separates the year of the decision from the year you downloaded it. Third, it separates the court's opinion from a publisher's introductory summary. A summary can help you find a passage, but return to the opinion before representing a sentence as the Court's own conclusion. Your final citation should identify the authority you inspected, not merely the search tool that led you there.

If the electronic copy has no visible reporter page markers, stop before assigning a reporter pinpoint. Look for an official copy, a faithfully paginated scan, or another source containing the necessary locator. You can record a file page temporarily in your research notes, but mark it as a viewer coordinate. Do not promote it into a reporter page through guesswork. If no reliable reporter location is available, use a supported alternative format appropriate to the actual source and receiving requirements.

Before closing the file, test the card in reverse. Start with the proposed citation and ask whether another reader could identify the decision and locate the inspected passage. Then start with the passage and ask whether the sentence preserves its subject and limits. These two checks protect access and accuracy. They do not replace legal analysis, but they provide a dependable first success: a source-supported historical sentence with a citation that actually leads to its support.

A pinpoint can legitimately repeat the first page. If the proposition appears on the page where a reported decision begins, Indigo R11.7 retains both functions: first page, then the same number as pinpoint. Do not remove the repeated number merely because a proofreading tool calls it a duplicate. Conversely, a citation discussing a decision as a whole may have no particular passage to pinpoint. Decide what the sentence uses before treating every citation lacking a second page number as defective.

Fictional training example — not legal authority. An invented decision begins at page 100 of volume 12 of Fictional Reporter, and its opening paragraph contains the precise procedural ruling being described. Its reporter portion is 12 Fiction Rep. 100, 100. Page 100 first identifies the opinion and then locates the ruling. If the explanatory parenthetical instead describes reasoning at page 104, the reporter portion becomes 12 Fiction Rep. 100, 104. The first page stays fixed; the relevant passage changes.

Check a pinpoint against every claim attached to it. A sentence may accurately describe a result on one page while its explanatory parenthetical describes reasoning on another. Supply the needed locations, divide the citation, or revise the parenthetical. One checked number cannot silently verify an additional statement located elsewhere. When an argument spans pages, inspect the entire necessary span; a range is a representation about the material on those pages, not a way to hide uncertainty about its location.

A downloaded decision may package several texts together: a syllabus, the court's opinion, separate opinions, and publication notes. Read the labels at their boundaries. An accurate quotation from the syllabus remains a quotation from that text; it does not become a quotation from the majority by sharing a PDF with it. Likewise, a dissent can accurately reproduce a party's argument without making that argument the court's conclusion.

Add an opinion field to the source card when the document contains multiple voices. Record majority, concurrence, dissent, or another supplied designation and the author's name when relevant and actually given. If the disputed proposition appears only in a separate opinion, keep that fact in the sentence or citation. The publication address can identify the right case while still leading to the wrong speaker. Chapter 8 develops this distinction for case characterization and history.