Welcome to Citing State and Federal Legislative Resources Using the APA Style Manual 7th edition. Today, we are going to cover exactly what is legal citation according to the APA 7th edition style manual. We are going to talk a little bit about the legislative process. How to cite the different types of legislative documents that are part of that process, and we're going to start with the bill that is introduced during the legislative or congressional session. Then we're going to discuss how to cite that bill once it has been codified as law or a statute, or embodied in an administrative code. Finally, we are going to examine how to cite staff analyses and model acts. Citing materials in APA begins with The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation published by the Harvard Law Review Association, the Columbia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Yale Law Review Journal. The Bluebook addresses all forms of legal and non-legal materials with a standard format and standard abbreviations for state names and for commonly used words and phrases. Legal citation, APA style, also use The Bluebook state, word, and phrase abbreviations. So, it requires you to become familiar with both style guides. As you can see from this table, there are major differences between APA 7th and The Bluebook. These include what items are cited. APA has formats for journal articles and books. Bluebook does not. How items are placed in the reference list and in in-text. APA uses author. Bluebook uses title. How versions of the work are cited. APA uses the exact version of the document you are looking at. Bluebook uses the official version. And use of standard abbreviations. Bluebook has many more abbreviations for common legal entities, words, and states. Also, how the references are formatted. End of document vs. footnotes. And a single form for a citation vs. long and short forms. APA also requires the use of a DOI or URL if available. Bluebook does not. So, now look at the legislative world. The legislative process occurs during the legislative session. During the session, legislation may be pending in that it is under review by the House or the Senate. It may be passed in that both the House and the Senate have agreed that it should become law. Once legislation has become law, it is published in the state or federal statutes. Once it is published as statute, it is also published in a state or federal administrative code. Each of these three items: legislation, statute, and code, has its own rules for citations. Citing legislation uses a simple rubric. I use a WHO, WHAT, WHICH, WHERE, and WHEN rubric for each form of citation with the appropriate punctuation. Each element in the rubric addresses a required piece of the citation required by The Bluebook and is used in the APA 7th citation style. This rubric incorporates both the state and the federal citation elements. These elements are: WHAT is being reviewed? The legislation. WHO is doing the reviewing? That is the legislative body and the number of the session of that legislative body. [WHICH] refers to the meeting session of the legislative body. WHERE tells you in which state the body met in. And WHEN is the year the legislative body met. APA 7th requires you to use the URL of the official site. Whether it's the state legislature site or a federal government site, you should never use a professional association site or any other website that has simply copied and pasted the legislation on to their website. It must be the official site of the law or legislation. So you may ask, what does the number of legislative body or number of session mean when citing legislation? Tying legislation to a year of a specific legislative or congressional session is required for The Bluebook. The number of legislative body refers to how the year the legislature, assembly or congress has been numbered since its inception such as the 134th Congress or the 126th Assembly. Florida does not use an enumeration system. So looking at the example, the citation simply says abbreviated Florida Legislature appropriately. Now a session refers to the type of legislative session. Regular sessions include the annual session. In Florida, that's from January to March. Special sessions indicate that an additional session was called and the special indicates that the session occurred after the regular session ended. If more than one of these sessions is called in the same year, it also receives a number so people can track in which one of the sessions a specific bill or legislation was addressed. As you can see in the screenshot on this slide, 2015 was a very busy legislative session, as there was a regular session and three special sessions called. This information is easily findable on the Online Sunshine House or Senate site as a Search option. On the House site, the Session drop down is under the Bills tab. On the Senate site, it's under the Sessions tab and select Bills. So, a legislative citation will contain: the bill number, the number and name of the legislative body, the session in which the legislation was reviewed or passed, the state of the legislative body, the year, and the URL all appropriately abbreviated. As you can see by the examples on this page, the citations are fairly straightforward. Now you may ask, why is the name of the act included in square brackets in the federal legislation example? Both APA and The Bluebook allow you to add information, such as the name of the act or the topic of the legislation, to a citation using square brackets. Square brackets indicate it is additional information. You may add the name of the act if you are citing to an entire act as codified in the U.S. code. If the statute is commonly cited that way or if the information adds identification of the material that is being cited. So, for the Senate Bill 810 citation, you could add in square brackets [Use of tobacco products and nicotine products] if you wanted to. Laws are generally found in specific books such as statutes or the laws. The statutes is a permanent collection of state laws organized by subject area into a code made up of titles, chapters, parts, and sections. The laws is a compilation of all the laws, resolutions, and memorials passed during the legislative session. They are divided in two broad categories: general laws and special laws. Most people use the state or federal statutes to cite legislation. There are only five elements in this rubric. The first three are easy: the name of the statute or law, the name of the work, and where in the work it is found. The year you use according to The Bluebook is when the legislation became law. The Bluebook requires both inception and amended dates, if you're viewing the chapter after it was last amended. So, in this case, the Florida Mental Health Act was codified in 1971. The revised [2009] date indicates that in 2009 the involuntary commitment section of Chapter 394 was modified. And since it is well past 2009, I am citing the most current official version. So, both dates should be used. The Laws are the compilation of all of the laws, resolutions, and memorials passed during a legislative session. Most of the time, people use a state or federal statute to cite legislation. The Laws are good to cite sometimes to show specific changes or amendment to existing law. I might cite the Florida Mental Health Act using the statute citation for the entire act, and then cite the mental illness chapter in the Laws of Florida for the specific chapter and section language that was amended in the Florida Mental Health Act. There are only five elements in this rubric. The name of the act or topic, the name of the work, where in the work it is found (in this case, the Laws of Florida), the chapter, the year it became official, and the URL. A federal statute follows the same rules as a state statute. Its rubric is a little different in that it includes both the public law and the statute citations rolled into one. Most people know the public law number and the name of the act. Adding in the statute location makes it easier to crosswalk the specific act or piece of legislation across all three. Always add the name of the act if you are citing an entire act as codified in the U.S. Code, if the statute is commonly cited that way, or if the information aids identification in the materials cited. So in this rubric, in that, it combines law and statute elements together. WHAT is the name of the act? WHICH source is being cited? In this case, the public law number. WHICH other source is being cited? In this case, the statutes which requires the chapter number of the statute and the first page of the chapter followed by the URL. State administrative codes are simple. It's simply the name of the act, the name of the code - in this case, Fla. Admin. Code. Since the code may be revised or annotated, you need to check if there have been revisions or annotations. If there's no information on the code that has been annotated or revised, you can skip that piece of information, and then you move to the next piece which is the chapter and number of the code. Then you add the date and the URL. The official code for federal statutes is the United States Code, the U.S.C. So citing the U.S.C., the date in a citation is the year of the Code edition as it appears on the spine of the print volume or on the title page. It may not be the year a statute was enacted or last amended. As with the others, you may add the name of the act if you are citing to an entire act as codified in the U.S.C. If it is commonly cited that way or if the information aids in identification of the materials cited. Since staff analyses examine the fiscal, legal or regulatory impact of a proposed bill, they can be valuable references in the discussion of why a specific bill should be passed. To cite the staff analysis using the rubric, here are some points to consider. Staff analyses are often a two part authour. Senate or House committees have a lot of staff assigned to them to prepare these analyses. Since there may be multiple people who write portions of the analysis, the generic word, Staff, is often used. In addition, the name of the committee or subcommittee who asked for the analysis will be part of the authour name. This is important because a bill may be assigned to multiple committees or subcommittees for review and you want to reference the right analysis for a specific committee. So, for this example, the first part of the authour name is Staff. The second part of an authour is the name of the committee or subcommittee. And because legal citations follow The Bluebook legal citation style, you need to use the appropriate Bluebook abbreviations. In the case of a Florida Senate committee, we use Fla.S. We use the name of the committee and the subcommittee as written, Health & Human Services and Health Quality, and we abbreviate Committee and Subcommittee as Comm. and Subcomm. respectively. So, the authour name is Staff of Florida Senate Health & Human Services Committee and Health Quality Subcommittee. Titles may also be a two part title. The first part will be the bill number, the bill title, and the year of the session. So, here we have the authour. It's a Staff of name of committee or subcommittee, the committee information, the number of the bill, name of bill and date. That information is generally found in the upper left hand corner of the staff analysis as in CS/CS/HB (House Bill) 607 Direct Care Workers. The year, the title of the analysis which is found at the top of the document, House of Representatives Staff Final Bill Analysis, the version and date of analysis since staff analyses may have multiple versions which would be identified by a version number such as a draft number and the date. If there was a version, as in the example, the word Final in the title goes in the section, the location of the report, and since you probably found the staff analysis on the legislature's website, you use the URL of the virtual version of the analysis. If you acquired a paper copy from the committee, you would note it as (On file with committee). APA allows you to add more information about a source and a citation to clarify the citation. However, it must meet The Bluebook standard as well. So, if you're going to add more information, you must use [square brackets] to indicate it is not required by The Bluebook citation style. So in this case, we [would] have added [Direct Care Workers] to the end of the citation after the URL. Finally, we are looking at Uniform Laws. Uniform laws are carefully drafted model laws for potential enactment by state legislatures. Uniform laws are authoured by the Uniform Law Commission, the ULC. Model legislation may also be a model act or a model code. Model acts are generally used as a basis for designing state laws. They are rarely enacted in entirety. Model legislation may be preferred by any individual or organisation such as the American Bar Association, the American Law Association, and ULC. Model legislation and uniform laws are treated as a text. Think book format. The date is pulled from the most current model document. You include the month and the year. If there are multiple versions, you must include the version number to differentiate among the multiple works. You can add the version number to the end of the title. You include the acronym for the name of legislation in parentheses. You add square brackets to indicate the type of work. The publisher, you can use the acronym. In this case, NCSBN for the National Council of State Boards of Nursing, and then finally the URL. We've come to the end of the presentation. I hope this has been helpful and has clarified many of the common questions surrounding how to cite legal citations, legislature, statutes, laws and codes, APA 7th style using The Bluebook. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at the USF Health Libraries. Send us an email or set up an appointment. Thank you very much.