How to Cite a Supreme Court Case (and When to Italicize It)

Legal cases are sources for political science, history, education policy and any field that touches law. The citation is short, fixed and unusually well documented, and the most common mistakes are avoidable.

The Basic Components

Georgetown Law Library's Bluebook guide lists the five elements of a United States Reports citation:

• the name of the case, abbreviated according to Rule 10.2
• the volume of the United States Reports
• the reporter abbreviation, "U.S."
• the first page of the case
• the year the case was decided

Standard Legal Citation (Bluebook)

Breaking it down:

• Brown v. Board of Education — the case name
• 347 — volume of the United States Reports
• U.S. — the reporter abbreviation
• 483 — first page of the case
• (1954) — year decided

Georgetown's guide gives Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973) as its own worked example of the same form.

For a specific page — a pinpoint citation — the page follows the first page:

Which reporter you must cite is a rule, not a preference. Georgetown: "When citing a U.S. Supreme Court case, you must cite to the official reporter, the United States Reports, if the case is published therein (Table 1, p.233)."

Non-Legal Academic Styles

The elements above do not change. What changes is how the surrounding entry is dressed.

APA covers legal references in the legal-references chapter of the Publication Manual (7th ed.), which is not reproduced on the free APA Style site — there is no court-decision example page there. Rather than assert an APA template we could not verify against the authority or against two independent library guides, here is what is safe: the case citation itself is the Bluebook citation, and APA's own convention of adding a retrievable URL applies as it does elsewhere.

In-text: (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954)

MLA's legal-citation guidance is in the MLA Handbook (9th ed.) rather than on the free MLA Style Center, and Chicago's Citation Quick Guide has no case entry — Chicago's legal chapter is in the Manual itself. Check the manual you are required to use. If your instructor has no preference, use the Bluebook form, which every legal database will show you.

Finding Case Citations

Official source: the United States Reports (abbreviated U.S.), published by the U.S. Government.

Free sources:

• The Supreme Court's own site, supremecourt.gov, for slip opinions and United States Reports volumes
• The Library of Congress, which hosts scanned United States Reports volumes as PDFs for 1754–2012
• Cornell's Legal Information Institute, law.cornell.edu
• CourtListener, courtlistener.com, and Justia, supreme.justia.com

Subscription databases: Westlaw, Lexis, Bloomberg Law.

Use the United States Reports citation where it exists — it is the official reporter, and the Bluebook requires it.

Parallel Reporters

Supreme Court opinions are published in three reporters. Georgetown: the United States Reports is "an official publication of the United States Government and the preferred reporter to cite for U.S. Supreme Court cases according to The Bluebook. However, there is generally a significant lag between when the Court decides a case and when it is published in the United States Reports."

Every case therefore carries parallel citations to the unofficial reporters, which appear sooner. Brown itself, for instance, is reported at 347 U.S. 483, at 74 S. Ct. 686 in the Supreme Court Reporter, and at 98 L. Ed. 873 in United States Supreme Court Reports, Lawyers' Edition. Cite the official reporter where you can, and an unofficial one only where the official citation does not yet exist.

Recent Cases Without a U.S. Reports Citation

While a case is waiting for its bound volume, the Court's slip-opinion list shows a volume and part rather than a page. Georgetown gives the slip-opinion form — case name, docket number, then the court and full date in parentheses:

That case is on the Court's 2025-term slip-opinion list with docket number 24-43, decided 30 June 2026, and listed against reporter volume 609, part 2 — a volume and part, but no page. Once the volume is paginated, the citation acquires its page — as Biden v. Nebraska, No. 22-506, decided 30 June 2023, has since become:

For an unpublished case available in a database, Georgetown's guide adds the database identifier between the docket number and the court, and its own example is United States v. Bennett, No. 05-CR-6050 CJS, 2005 WL 2709572 (W.D.N.Y. Oct. 21, 2005).

Historical Cases

The earliest volumes of the United States Reports were published under their reporters' names, and the citation carries both:

"1 Cranch" is volume 1 of William Cranch's reports, which is also volume 5 of the United States Reports. The case was decided on 24 February 1803.

Lower Federal Courts

For the U.S. Courts of Appeals, the reporter is the Federal Reporter and the parenthetical gives the circuit and the year:

For the U.S. District Courts, the reporter is the Federal Supplement and the parenthetical gives the district:

Both of those are real decisions in the same line of fair-use litigation about mass digitization of books — a useful pair for anyone writing about libraries and copyright.

State Supreme Court Cases

Here the Bluebook reverses its preference. Georgetown: "Unlike U.S. Supreme Court cases, however, The Bluebook dictates that you generally cite to a case in the unofficial regional reporter, if therein, rather than the official state reporter (Rule 10.3.1(b))." You may also need the official state reporter if a court's own rules require it (Rule 10.3.1(a)).

The regional-reporter citation has six elements: case name, volume, reporter abbreviation, first page, state and court, and year. Georgetown's own example is Beachy v. Becerra, 609 N.W.2d 648 (Neb. 2000). Applied to a California Supreme Court decision:

The same case in California's official reporter is 43 Cal. 4th 757. Note that the parenthetical is just "Cal." Georgetown explains why: under Rule 10.4(b) "you do not include the name of the court if the court of decision is the highest court in the state." The Supreme Court of California is that court, so its abbreviation drops out and the state abbreviation stands alone.

Citing Separate Opinions

Supreme Court decisions often contain concurrences and dissents, and which opinion you are citing matters. Name the justice and the opinion in a parenthetical after the pinpoint:

That pinpoint is checked: Justice Harlan's sentence "Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens" appears on page 559 of volume 163 of the United States Reports.

In-Text References

First mention: the full citation. After that, a short form — "Brown", or "the Brown decision". Pick the party name a reader will recognise, which is usually the first-named one, and keep it consistent.

Quotations From Cases

Always give a pinpoint for a quotation, and check it against the reporter's pagination rather than a web page's scroll position:

That quotation and its page were checked against the scanned United States Reports volume: the sentence falls on page 495.

Where These Rules Come From

• The Bluebook is not free to read online. Its rules are followed here as reproduced by Georgetown Law Library's Bluebook Guide (guides.ll.georgetown.edu/bluebook) — the "Citing Cases", "Federal Courts", "State Courts" and "Unpublished Opinions" pages, which cite Rule 10, Rules 10.2–10.4, 10.3.1, 10.8.1 and Tables 1, 6, 7, 10 and 12. Every quoted sentence above about the five elements, reporters, italicization, unpublished opinions and state courts comes from those four pages, read today. Harvard Law School Library's Bluebook guide (guides.library.harvard.edu/law/bluebook) corroborates the framework and records the current edition as the 22nd (2025).
• APA, MLA, Chicago: none of the three publishes a court-decision example on its free site; their legal-reference chapters are in the Publication Manual (7th ed.), the MLA Handbook (9th ed.) and the Chicago Manual of Style. This page does not assert a template for them.
• Every case cited here was checked today, and the note below says against what, because no single free source covers all of them. CourtListener — which this page recommends, and which is the usual first stop for a person in a browser — answers scripted requests with a challenge page rather than the opinion, so no citation below rests on it. The one thing we could not check is the CourtListener link inside the APA example above; it is there because that is the kind of link APA asks for, not because we resolved it today.
  • From the Caselaw Access Project's published volume data (static.case.law), which reproduces the bound reporters: Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, decided 17 May 1954, with parallel citations 74 S. Ct. 686 and 98 L. Ed. 873; Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, decided 18 May 1896; Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 / 1 Cranch 137, February 1803; Authors Guild v. Google, Inc., 804 F.3d 202, Second Circuit, 16 October 2015; Authors Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust, 902 F. Supp. 2d 445, S.D.N.Y., 10 October 2012; In re Marriage Cases, 43 Cal. 4th 757, California Supreme Court, 15 May 2008; Beachy v. Becerra, 259 Neb. 299 / 609 N.W.2d 648, Nebraska Supreme Court, 21 April 2000.
  • From the Supreme Court's own site: Biden v. Nebraska, on the 2022-term slip-opinion list as docket 22-506, decided 30 June 2023, citation 600 U.S. 477; and West Virginia v. B. P. J., on the 2025-term list as docket 24-43, decided 30 June 2026, against reporter volume 609, part 2 — a volume and part, with no page yet.
  • The parallel citation 183 P.3d 384 for In re Marriage Cases is not in the Caselaw Access Project's Pacific Reporter volume, so it was taken from the U.S. Supreme Court's own opinion in Hollingsworth v. Perry, 570 U.S. 693, 700, which cites "In re Marriage Cases, 43 Cal. 4th 757, 183 P. 3d 384", read in the scanned United States Reports volume hosted by the Library of Congress.
  • Marbury's decision date of 24 February 1803 is not printed in Cranch's report, which gives only the February 1803 term; it is taken from the Library of Congress research guide to the case (guides.loc.gov/marbury-v-madison), which states that "the Supreme Court issued its opinion on February 24, 1803."
• The two quotations and their pinpoint pages were checked against the scanned official volumes hosted by the Library of Congress (tile.loc.gov), counting pages from the first page of each case: the Brown sentence falls on 347 U.S. 495, and Harlan's sentence on the page headed "Dissenting Opinion: Harlan, J." at 163 U.S. 559.