How to Cite a Court Case (APA 7 and MLA 9)

Why case citation is its own dialect

Case citation evolved inside law reviews and courtrooms, where the case name and the reporter cite are the whole identity: no author, no publisher, no title separate from the parties. Neither current style manual improvises here - APA 7 explicitly borrows Bluebook rules for legal materials, and MLA 9 defers to legal convention for cases - so a case citation looks alien inside an otherwise APA reference list, and that is correct rather than an error to normalize. The how-to-cite-a-law page covers the statute half of the same dialect; cases are the sibling with a different anatomy, and the two share every habit described here.

The dialect also has a boundary, and the how-to-cite-a-law page draws the same one: law school and legal-writing courses follow full Bluebook, which is stricter than anything here, while undergraduate and graduate social-science papers use the simplified borrowed subset. Your syllabus tells you which world you are in, and asking once saves a rewritten list. What never changes across the boundary is the vocabulary: the case name carries a lowercase 'v.' with periods - never 'vs.' - the parties keep their italics in both styles, and the citation is formula rather than composition, with fixed elements in fixed order that verification checks element by element.

The numbers at a glance

Court case citation shapes at a glance — the range, and where each row actually shows up in coursework. Skim it first; the sections below explain why the range exists and which row applies to you.

The APA 7 pattern, element by element

Build the entry from five parts in fixed order: case name in italics, reporter volume, reporter abbreviation, first page, then court and year in parentheses. The landmark shape is Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954): volume 347 of United States Reports, page 483, decided by the Supreme Court in 1954 - the court name drops out when the reporter makes it obvious, which is why U.S. cites omit it while F.3d and F. Supp. cites carry circuit or district in the parentheses. In text, the name is italicized with the year: (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954), shortening to the first party's usage conventions after the first full mention.

Reporters are the retrieval layer, and picking the right one is most of the work. U.S. is the Supreme Court's official reporter; S. Ct. and L. Ed. are acceptable parallels; F.2d, F.3d, and F. Supp. cover the federal appellate and trial courts; state cases cite the state reporter or the regional one - 410 N.W.2d 315 style - with the court named in parentheses. When the case comes from an aggregator like Justia, the Legal Information Institute or CourtListener, add the URL as the final element, because that is the version consulted; the what-is-a-doi-vs-url preference for the stable identifier applies, and a commercial database name never substitutes for the cite itself.

MLA 9 and naming cases in prose

MLA 9's works-cited entry rearranges the same facts: Name v. Name. Vol. Reporter, Court, Year. - Brown v. Board of Education. 347 U.S., Supreme Court of the United States, 1954. - with an aggregator or database as a second container when that is where you read it. In text, MLA names the case in the parenthetical without a year: (Brown v. Board of Education), and the case name stays italicized in prose as well as in the list. The entry is short; the discipline is in the prose habit, because a paper that discusses rulings without naming the case in every discussion sentence leaves the grader matching citations to claims unaided.

Name the case in the sentence every time the paper weighs its holding - 'In Brown v. Board of Education, the Court held...' - and let the parenthetical carry locators rather than identity, which mirrors the statute pattern the how-to-cite-a-law page teaches. Identity lives in the prose; the parenthetical just confirms it. When the assignment asks you to work through the opinion itself rather than cite it, the how-to-write-a-supreme-court-opinion-summary page covers reading the structure of a decision: majority, concurrences, dissents, and the holding buried in the syllabus headnotes. In legal scholarship, Chicago-style footnotes dominate, and the footnote-vs-endnote page covers that machinery for courses that want it; APA and MLA papers almost never do.

Quoting, secondary sources and verification

Quote a case the way you quote any authority: with a pincite. APA attaches the page to the in-text citation - (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954, p. 490) - where the page number is the reporter page where the quoted language sits; MLA extends the standard (Name page) form. If you met the case only through a textbook, an article or another opinion quoting it, cite what you read: the secondary-citation rules the what-is-a-secondary-citation page explains apply to cases exactly as to studies, with 'as cited in' in APA. Chase the original on an aggregator whenever the holding carries real weight in the argument, because headnotes and textbook summaries compress holdings in ways that distort them.

Verification is the step that catches generator errors, and legal materials attract them exactly as the how-to-cite-a-law page warns: generators expect author-title-publisher inputs that cases do not have, so their outputs quietly reorder elements, invent courts, or drop the reporter cite. Treat every generated case citation as a draft and check it element by element against Justia, the Legal Information Institute, CourtListener or the court's own site - free sources, one minute each. The source-credibility-checker runs the institutional-source checks for the rest of the list; the case check remains a hand job, and it is worth the minute, because a garbled case cite in a policy paper undercuts every careful sentence around it.

Three minutes to a clean citation

Edge-case citations punish hesitation, not ignorance: the student who spends twenty minutes googling a no-author format loses more time to doubt than the format ever costs. Decide the pattern once — title moves forward, organization counts as author, n.d. when no date exists anywhere — and apply it mechanically. Consistency across your list matters more to graders than perfect recall of manual arcana.

Automate what's mechanical. The citation generator below formats journal articles, books, chapters and websites in all three major styles, including the awkward cases on this page. Paste the metadata, copy the output, done — the minutes you save belong to analysis, which is where rubric points actually live. Cross-check in-text forms against the table above and the reference list is submission-ready.