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.
Read more about this topic: Case Citation
Famous quotes related to united states:
“What lies behind facts like these: that so recently one could not have said Scott was not perfect without earning at least sorrowful disapproval; that a year after the Gang of Four were perfect, they were villains; that in the fifties in the United States a nothing-man called McCarthy was able to intimidate and terrorise sane and sensible people, but that in the sixties young people summoned before similar committees simply laughed.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“United States! the ages plead,—
Present and Past in under-song,—
Go put your creed into your deed,—
Nor speak with double tongue.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The United States is a republic, and a republic is a state in which the people are the boss. That means us. And if the big shots in Washington don’t do like we vote, we don’t vote for them, by golly, no more.”
—Willis Goldbeck (1900–1979)
“Places where he might live and die and never hear of the United States, which make such a noise in the world,—never hear of America, so called from the name of a European gentleman.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Of all the nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody’s image. It was the land of the unexpected, of unbounded hope, of ideals, of quest for an unknown perfection. It is all the more unfitting that we should offer ourselves in images. And all the more fitting that the images which we make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the world should come back to haunt and curse us.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)