Hello and welcome to the Scholarly Communications video series from the Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library! My name is Paul Levett and I’m one of the Reference librarians. Today we will be talking about APA Citations for Legal Resources. Let’s get started. The APA style follows modified Bluebook guidelines for legal references. Bluebook is the most widely used US legal citation style and is taught in our GW Law School to help law students cite cases and the legal code. Chapter 11 of the APA publication manual gives examples of legal citations. It is important to remember that APA style modifies the Bluebook rules, it does not follow them verbatim. The main modification to know is APA in-text legal citations are not numbered, neither are they required to be footnotes, as Bluebook requires for articles in law review journals. Later we shall see examples of how APA handles Case law and statutory law. The GW Burns Law Library has a guide on the Bluebook. As with the APA publication manual, the full text of the Bluebook is not online, but the guide does link to useful resources for learning including "the Bluebook uncovered" which is a free online book for 1st year law students introducing the fundamentals of Bluebook citation rules. The Nexis-Uni database has an instant Bluebook citation feature, you can search for case law and each record has an Export Citation Button, when you click you can select Bluebook as one of the styles and copy and paste the citation into a text editor such as Notepad. Using a bibliographic citation manager like Refworks would apply the citation style selected to the whole document. You can't tell Refworks to automatically apply more than one citation style, for example both APA and Bluebook: it has to be one or the other, so I recommend keeping it to APA 7th edition. Therefore if you want to include a legal citation in Bluebook style into an APA formatted bibliography, you will need to edit the Bluebook legal citation from Nexis Uni and copy and paste it from your text editor into your bibliography, and in-text, as on this example. So the reason for needing to manually edit the Bluebook citation is because auto-generated Bluebook citations in Nexis-Uni or Refworks are not strictly formatted in Bluebook style. You can see from the Nexis-Uni citation, most of the elements of a proper Bluebook citation are there, but you need to edit out the extra text. So how do you know what it should look like? In APA style Case law is formatted as Plaintiff versus defendant, and the year the case was decided. So in this example that is Rescuecom Corporation versus Google Inc. in 2009. Note the use of abbreviations. Bluebook is very particular about their rules on abbreviations, which is why you need to consult the Bluebook to understand which one's to use. Here are the elements of Bluebook citation broken down: So you have the names of the parties in the case, then the volume number of the reporter containing the published opinion, then the Bluebook abbreviation for the reporter, then the first page of the opinion in the reporter, then any additional jurisdictional identification, and finally the year the case was decided. Statutory law is formatted using the following formats: The US Code federal law is cited in-text and in the bibliography as ▪ name of the Act where it exists, else leave blank ▪ title number; ▪ abbreviated name of code (found in Table T1.1); ▪ section symbol (§ or §§, depending on how many sections are cited); ▪ section number(s), including any relevant subsections. For legislation that has not passed Congress, you cite the bill name and number as it was introduced into either the House of Representatives or the Senate. Bear in mind most legislation is referred to a reviewing committee at an early stage where it is either dropped or passed forward, only a small portion moves forward to full consideration and passes Congress to be signed by the President and enacted into law. Legislation that has passed Congress, also known as the "session laws", usually has a name of the bill, so your in-text citations are the name of the law if that is how it is commonly known. Our first example is to a section of the US Code that has no bill name associated with it so you just give the Title and Section numbers eg Title 28, U.S.C., and the § number 1332 Our second example is the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which was enacted into the US Code in one sequence of sections, in Chapter 126 of Title 42 which deals with Public Health. Our third example is when a bill is enacted into more than one Title number or Chapter in the US Code, then you should include the public law number, for example the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 includes the Public Law number 111-148, and was published in Volume 124 of the United States Statutes at Large, beginning on page 119, in the year 2010. Once you know the Public Law number for a piece of enacted federal legislation, you can consult the Table of Classifications for Public Laws to identify what Title, Chapter, or Section numbers of the US Code were amended to incorporate the new wording, these are published on the website uscode.house.gov State law differs depending on the jurisdiction but the general citation rules are ▪ abbreviated name of code; ▪ section symbol § if required for the particular state; ▪ section number(s), including any relevant subsections; and ▪ year (and sometimes also the name) of the publication in which the enacted code was reported. States have different ways of citing their own laws so to determine how you should format your citation you should look up the jurisdiction in the Bluebook Table T1 and review how they organize their citations. Our Example #1 is for Viginia, which organizes its statutes by title. A full citation to section 32 of title 42 in the 2018 edition of the "Code of Virginia annotated" would be this: Our example #2 is for New York, which organizes its code by subject matter. A full citation to section 2807 of the Public Health chapter of the New York code in the 2015 edition of "McKinney’s Consolidated Laws of New York Annotated" would be this: Our third example is for California, which also organizes its statutes by subject matter. So a full citation to section 100 of California’s Probate Code in the 2008 edition of "West’s Annotated California Codes" would be this: The Bluebook is very complicated so if you have specific questions about Bluebook citation formatting I recommend you contact the reference staff at the Burns Law Library, and if you have more APA questions, contact us in the Himmelfarb Library. Ask at the Burns Law Library to consult the print copy of the Bluebook 21st edition, and also the book "Understanding and Mastering the Bluebook", which the law librarians regard as a great resource for people attempting legal citation that are not familiar with the Bluebook. You can consult the print edition of the APA Publication Manual in the Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library. Thank you for taking the time to listen to APA Citations for Legal Resources. If you enjoyed this tutorial, please visit our video library here where you can also find the associated slides. If you have any questions about the material covered in this session or have questions specific to your own research don’t hesitate to contact us at [email protected] On behalf of the Himmelfarb Library Scholarly Communications team, thank you for listening!