What order do parentheticals go in?
Say the case you cite was decided by a plurality, you quoted it while it was quoting another case, you want to say what it held, and a higher court later affirmed it. Which parenthetical comes first, and where does the history go?
Reply below with a citation you are unsure about (no client facts) and members can weigh in.
The team’s answer
Short answer. Work outward from the court and year. First comes anything that tells the reader what kind of opinion it is. Then your notes about quoted words, then your explanation of what the case did. The case's later history goes last, after every parenthetical.
The order [Convention]
1. Court and year, such as (D.C. Cir. 2012).
2. The kind of opinion: (en banc), (per curiam), (plurality opinion), (Gorsuch, J., concurring).
3. Notes about quoted words: alterations, emphasis, omissions, and a (quoting ...) or (citing ...) attribution.
4. Your explanation: (holding that ...), (collecting cases).
5. Prior or subsequent history: a comma, then aff'd, rev'd or cert. denied and the later citation.
Each piece gets its own pair of parentheses, with a space between pairs.
Inside step 3, practice differs [Unresolved]
A free public-domain citation manual lists (quoting ...) before (internal quotation marks omitted). Other writers put every note about the words, that one included, ahead of the attribution. The Supreme Court has also put both in one parenthetical, attribution first: on page 405 of Loper Bright, a citation ends "(quoting ...; alteration in original)."
[House style] We put the notes about the words first, then (quoting ...) or (citing ...). Whichever you choose, use it the same way throughout the document.
Examples (each checked against its source)
Opinion type, then history:
United States v. Hamdan, 801 F. Supp. 2d 1247 (C.M.C.R. 2011) (en banc), rev'd, 696 F.3d 1238 (D.C. Cir. 2012).
"En banc" describes the 2011 decision, so it sits next to that court and year, ahead of the reversal. The reversing case is captioned Hamdan v. United States, but when the parties' names are only reversed the history gives no new name.
Opinion type, then explanation:
Loper Bright Enters. v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. 369, 469 (2024) (Kagan, J., dissenting) (arguing that the APA's review provision allows a deference regime).
The same dissent orders its own citations this way. On that page it cites Justice Alito's dissent in Wilkinson v. Garland with (Alito, J., dissenting) first and (noting ...) second.
Opinion type, then a note about quoted words: on page 25 of Allen v. Milligan, 599 U.S. 1 (2023), the Court cites Thornburg v. Gingles with (plurality opinion) first and (some alterations omitted) second.
Common mistakes
History before the explanation. Write "..., rev'd, 696 F.3d 1238 (D.C. Cir. 2012) (holding that ...)" and the explanation now seems to describe the reversing court's decision.
A judge's label after (quoting ...), so the reader learns whose opinion it is only at the end.
Two kinds of information squeezed into one parenthetical, such as (per curiam, collecting cases).
"En banc" folded into the court-and-year parenthetical instead of standing on its own.
Read more
History phrases such as aff'd and rev'd, with real examples: https://citationcode.com/examples/subsequent-history (opens in a new tab)
The free video lesson on citation anatomy, which walks through the parenthetical slots: https://citationcode.com/lessons/l02-anatomy (opens in a new tab)
The Anatomy chapter (its opening is free to read): https://citationcode.com/book/anatomy (opens in a new tab)