Case Citation - United States

United States

The standard case citation format in the United States is:

Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973)

where:

• Roe v. Wade is the abbreviated name of the case. Generally, the first name Roe is the surname of the plaintiff, who is the party who filed the suit for an original case, or the appellant, the party appealing in a case being appealed from a lower court, or the petitioner when litigating in the high court of a jurisdiction; and Wade is the surname of the defendant, the party responding to the suit, or the appellee, the party responding to the appeal, or the respondent, when defending in the high court of the jurisdiction. There are exceptions. For example, under the Rules of the United States Supreme Court, parties are typically referred to as petitioner and respondent under Rule 12 (when seeking discretionary review by writ of certiorari), but are occasionally referred to as plaintiff and defendant under Rule 17 (when invoking the court's original jurisdiction as provided for in the U.S. Constitution) or as appellant and appellee under Rule 18 (when direct review is provided for by federal statute).
• 410 is the volume number of the "reporter" in which the Court's written opinion in the Roe v. Wade is published,
• U.S. is the abbreviation of the reporter, here "U.S." stands for United States Reports,
• 113 is the page number (in volume 410 of United States Reports) where the opinion begins, and
• 1973 is the year in which the court rendered its decision.
• The abbreviated name of the court will be included inside the parenthesis before the year if the name of the court is not obvious from the reporter; this rule comes into play because certain reporters, such as members of the West National Reporter System, publish opinions originating from multiple courts. In this example, the name of the court (United States Supreme Court) is obvious (since only decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court are published in the U.S. Reports) and is thus omitted.

Case citations are used to find a particular case, both when looking up a case in a printed reporter and when accessing it via the Internet or services such as LexisNexis or Westlaw.

This format also allows different cases with the same parties to be easily differentiated. For example, looking for the U.S. Supreme Court case of Miller v. California would yield four cases, some involving different people named Miller, and each involving different issues.