How to Use This Book

How to Use This Book

This book shows you how to cite the law, and the sources that explain it, in the documents you actually write: memos and client letters, briefs and motions, law-review notes, moot-court briefs and bench memos. It is written for law students meeting citation for the first time and for practitioners who want the right form, and the reason for it, before a deadline. Every example in the chapters is a real authority that we checked, and labels tell you which statements give a binding rule, which a common practice and which our own choice.

The book teaches form. It does not decide whether a source binds a court, may be cited there or is still good law; where those questions touch a citation, panels of their own keep them apart from form.

Quick start

For any other job, find your source in the Contents, then start from the Elements at a glance panel of its chapter.

How the book is organized

Five Parts. The chapters fall into five Parts. On every chapter page, the tab on the outer edge and the band across the top show which Part you are in.

• How Citation Works (ch. 1 to ch. 7). How to check a citation before you format it, then what every citation is made of: its parts and signals, quotations, pinpoints, short forms, typeface, and abbreviations, numbers and capitals.
• Practice Guide (ch. 8 to ch. 11). The same forms at work in memos and client letters, briefs and motions, law-review writing, and moot court and chambers, each shaped by whoever receives the document.
• Primary Law (ch. 12 to ch. 17). Constitutions, statutes, cases, regulations and agency materials, court documents and the record, and legislative materials.
• Secondary & Other Sources (ch. 18 to ch. 22). Journals and newspapers, books and reports, web pages and AI output, unpublished work, and databases and looseleaf services.
• Tribal, International & Foreign Law (ch. 23 to ch. 26). The law of Tribal Nations, treaties and international bodies, foreign legal systems, and archives and historical sources.

Inside a chapter. Each chapter opens with a one-line summary and a diagram of a real citation. Numbered callouts name its elements, and a small mark under the line shows each space the form calls for. The Elements at a glance panel repeats each number with the section that explains that element, and a closing line lists the chapter’s other sections. Every chapter sets wrong forms beside right ones, each with its reason, and has a section of errors to catch near its end. A section number joins the chapter’s number to the section’s: 14.3 is a section of chapter 14, and the band at the top of each page gives the chapter number. Sections of a reference table carry its letter instead, as in C.1.

Reference tables. After the chapters, eight tables hold what you look up rather than read:

• Table A, Courts & Codes by State. One entry for each state and the District of Columbia, in order of the two-letter postal code (AK, AL, AR, AZ …), then, under a divider of their own, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Each entry gives the courts and reporters with the years they cover and, where our research found them, citation rules, rules on precedent and unpublished opinions, appellate districts and their seats, early reporters, examples, practice notes, constitution and codes, session laws, court rules, administrative materials and Attorney General opinions. The running head of every page names its jurisdiction.
• Table B, Federal Courts & Agencies. The court part of a federal citation, from the Supreme Court to the bankruptcy, specialized and military courts and the courts that no longer exist, the federal reporters with the years they cover, and the series that print agency decisions.
• Table C, Court Citation Rules by State. For each state, the District of Columbia and the inhabited territories: the rules on citation form in filings, references to the record, court-numbered opinions, official style manuals and unpublished opinions.
• Table D, Word Abbreviations. Words in party names, places, months and document titles, shortened as courts print them.
• Table E, Journal Abbreviations. Citation forms for 971 law reviews and other periodicals, each with a mark that says where the form comes from (the journal’s own pages, court opinions, law-review articles, or our own construction), and how to build the form for a journal that is not listed.
• Table F, History & Explanatory Phrases. What to write when a higher court or a later case acted on the decision you cite, and the phrases that tie one source to another.
• Table G, Foreign & International Sources. The courts, codes, report series and identifiers of forty-one legal systems, and the label that tells a U.S. reader which country a citation comes from; the English reports before 1865 and the treaties that U.S. opinions cite; and twenty-two international courts and bodies.
• Table H, Usage Data. The counts behind the conventions, each with its sample, its basis and its date. A count shows usage, never a rule.

At the back. Sources & Licenses names the open court and reporter data the tables start from and gives its license terms. The Index sends you to the page where the section, chapter or table on a topic begins.

What the labels tell you

Four labels weigh what the book tells you. Each heads a shaded panel, and in the reference tables the same words can also mark rows or sit in a table’s key. The label tells you how much weight the statement carries, and so what to do with it.

• REQUIREMENT. An official rule, such as a statute, a court rule, a standing order or a court’s policy, binds the documents it reaches. The line under the label gives the jurisdiction, the rule, the date its current text took effect (or says that date is unresolved), what it reaches, and the day we confirmed it was in force. Inside that scope, follow it; outside it, it shows only what one court asks.
• CONVENTION. Common practice, on evidence we recorded: counts of what courts write (Table H), two or more independent sources that agree, or a rule of the public-domain Indigo Book. Follow it unless a rule or your reader asks for something else.
• HOUSE STYLE. Our own choice where practice splits or nothing settles the point, made for stated reasons. Use it when nothing governs you, and use it the same way through the whole document.
• UNRESOLVED. A question our sources did not settle as of the date under the label. Don’t guess: read the current rule, or ask the clerk, the editor or your supervisor, and keep the answer.

The receiving forum’s rule comes first. When a court, agency, journal or office sets citation rules for the documents it receives, its rule controls those documents within its scope, whatever this book says, and it outranks every CONVENTION and HOUSE STYLE here. Where no rule speaks, use this book’s forms and keep them consistent. So before you format, write down who will receive the document, what kind of document it is, and the date you will file or send it (1.2).

Other panels. LEGAL STATUS says what a source is, or what duty comes with filing it. PERMISSION TO CITE, PRECEDENTIAL WEIGHT and LATER TREATMENT keep those questions apart from form. All eight labels appear side by side in 1.3.

Marks in the tables. In Table A, a short label in italics after a value qualifies it. Unverified means our research has not yet confirmed the value, and partly verified that it has confirmed only part of it. Courts’ usage marks a form that two or more opinions in our corpus use. Conventional marks a form that rests on practice or on our own choice, not on an official source. House style marks the book’s own choice, as a HOUSE STYLE panel does. Unresolved, alone or in a longer label such as seat unresolved, names a point our research left open. Where “named in” and a rule follow a form, that rule’s own text gives the form. A question mark after a year means no official source has confirmed that year yet; in a line of early reporters, it means that the open court data and the Caselaw Access Project give different years. Each of the other tables explains its own markings, at its head or in the key under a table.

Reading an example

The triangle marks a worked example. Each one is a real authority, never an invented one; in Table A, treat an example marked partly verified as not yet fully confirmed. Examples are set in court-document typeface, the one for briefs, motions and memos, except where a chapter shows a law-review footnote or a court’s own style (chapter 6). In a forms table, shading marks the element the row teaches; nothing is shaded in your document.

What stands behind it. In the chapters and in the reference tables other than Table A, every example, every forms-table row, every corrected form beside a wrong one and every chapter diagram names a record in our research files. The record names each source we checked (most often the court’s or issuer’s own copy or a government publisher; otherwise an open case-law database, or a library, archive or other public copy), the elements they confirmed, the day of each check, and a saved copy of what we read. For a case, the checks cover the name, the citation, the court and the date of decision; for any other source, the citation and, where the form shows one, its date, edition or version. The checks behind this printing ran from October 10 to October 15, 2026. Before the pages were set, the build compared every full citation in those pages with its record: the citation had to match, and for a case the first party’s name and the year did too.

Pinpoints and dates. Outside Table A, each page or paragraph we pinpoint has its own entry in the record: where we read it, on what day, and a line on what the passage says. A full citation whose pinpoint has no entry stops the build. Page 412 above is the number printed on the page of the Supreme Court’s own preliminary print, not the PDF file’s page counter (it is the file’s 45th page), and it is where the Court overrules Chevron. The year in a case citation is the year of the decision, and the case’s record confirms that date from the source. A REQUIREMENT line dates the rule twice: when its current text took effect and when we confirmed it in force. Rules, reporters and websites change after the day we checked them, so before you file, read the current text of anything that governs your document.

Patterns and wrong forms. In a PATTERN panel, words in [brackets] are what you fill in. In a table headed “Not this” and “This”, the left column is the mistake, never a form to copy; the reason, set under the right form, names what is wrong.