- Academic journal articles header
- Appellate court case
- Federal statute
- State statute
- Law Review Article
References for federal, state statutes and court decisions are different from other types of sources. The following examples are based on chapter 11 of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, pp. 355-368, and examples from the APA Style Blog.
APA Style references versus Legal references
Legal citations use the same form across many disciplines outlined by the law field and standard legal citation style. Because of this, many existing legal citations do not need editing to fit into APA format.
General information
Statutes are laws written and enacted by the legislative branch of government. Most new laws are created through statutes (as opposed to being created by judges through case opinions). At the federal level, when a statute is published, it will be assigned a Public Law Number to identify it. The Public Law Number (i.e. Pub.L. No. 112-25) is made up of two parts: the first number represents the number of the Congress that passed the law; the second number represents the chronological order in which the law was passed. In the example above, Pub.L. No. 112-25 is the 25th law passed by the 112th Congress.
Common legal reference abbreviations table
Due to the possibility of some legal references containing large amounts of information, a series of abbreviations are utilized to help shorten citations. You will find some examples of commonly used legal abbreviations in the table bellow.
Category
Abbreviation
Congress
House of Representatives
Senate
