The Bluebook Guide
If Georgetown's Bluebook Guide does not adequately address your questions about a citation, The Bluebook is available as a Ready Reference book at the Guerrieri Academic Commons, just remember, ready reference books cannot be checked out, so you'll need to use it while in the library.
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The Bluebook
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ISBN: 9780692400197Publication Date: 2015-06-25"This edition of The Bluebook retains the same basic approach to legal citation established by its predecessors. The layout of the Bluebook has been updated to make the information easier to access. Some citation forms have been expanded, elaborated upon, or modified from previous editions to reflect the ever-expanding range of authorities used in legal writing and to respond to suggestions from the legal community."--Preface
Basic Parts of a Legal Citation
A legal citation's format will change based on several factors such as the jurisdiction, court, and type of case. But citations do have a few basic parts:
- Name of Case. In a court document this will be underlined or italicized, however in most academic writing such as law reviews, it would not. Typically a case name is the abbreviated name, for example "Brown v. Board of Education" would be used in a citation, not "Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka, Shawnee County, KAN., et al Briggs et al. v. Elliot et al. Davis et al. v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, VA, et al. Gebhart et al. v. Belton et. al." A comma follows the end of the case name.
- Volume number. No punctuation follows the volume number.
- Reporter Number. Sometimes you may encounter an unofficial reporter. For example, a Supreme Court case not yet published in United States Report (which is written as U.S.) may be available via unofficial reporters for the Supreme Court. The two unofficial reporters are Supreme Court Reporter (written as S. Ct.) and the United States Supreme Court Reports--Lawyers' Edition (written L. Ed.). The unofficial reporters should only be used if the official report has no yet been published. No punctuation follows the end of the Reporter unless it is a part of the reporter's abbreviation, for example, U.S.
- First page of the case followed by a comma
- The "pinpoint," this is used if you are quoting a specific page in the document. No punctuation follows.
- In parenthesis include the court and the decision year with no punctuation separating them. You do not include the court name for Supreme Court cases. No punctuation follows the closing parenthesis.
Using Google and the Bluebook Guide to Cite Cases
Both HeinOnline and Google Scholar shows all the information you will need to create a legal citation right under the case name. The benefit to Google Scholar is it doesn't default to also searching for law review articles, so it may be quicker to use Google Scholar for citation purposes.
This image shows the search results for Brown v. Board of Education. Under the search result there is a line that reads, "347 US 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873 - Supreme Court, 1954."
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Georgetown Bluebook GuideWith the information provided in your Google Case Law search, you can use the Georgetown Law Library's Bluebook Guide to format your citation.
Putting it together
I can see that my citation for Brown v. Board of Education has three different reporters listed, the unofficial reporters Supreme Court Reporter (74 S. Ct. 686) and the United States Supreme Court Reports Lawyer Edition (98 L. Ed. 873), and the official reporter, United States Report (347 U.S. 483). Always use the official report if it has been published. My citation for Brown v. Board of Education should therefore read:
Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).