Apa Reference Format for Laws

U.S. federal court decisions are published in different reports and therefore have different reference list templates. They are as follows: Reference to a specific section, namely “Copying by librarians: Delivery of copies to other libraries”: Copyright Regulations, Cap 528 § 50 (2019). Statutes are laws and laws adopted by legislative bodies. Federal laws can be found in the United States Code, abbreviated U.S.C., where they are divided into sections called titles that cover various topics. New laws are included in the title to which they belong most. State laws are published in a separate publication specific to each country. Your reference does not use a symbol for the title, but the section number is preceded by the symbol §. To insert the section icon in Word, click “Insert”, “Other Symbols, Special Characters”, and then find it in the list under “Section.” You don`t need to create a citation for entire federal or state constitutions. Just refer to them by name in the text. When citing specific articles and edits, create reference list entries and in-text citations as usual. The U.S. Constitution should be attached in reference lists and square brackets to U.S.

Const. be abbreviated. Use legal abbreviations for state constitutions, such as In. Const. for the Constitution of Indiana. In the story, spell these place names: United States, United States, Indiana. Follow the numbering pattern of the Constitution (Roman for articles and amendments of the United States Constitution and for articles of the State Constitution, but Arabic for State Amendments). Other legislative documents such as testimony, hearings, bills that are not statutes and related documents may also be cited. Your reference list templates (below) may contain a URL if it is available, but the URL is optional.

The quotations in the text follow the same patterns as court decisions and cases. You should check the Bluebook for state laws, as some states use chapter or article numbers instead of sections. The Bluebook also contains all the necessary abbreviations and symbols. Some federal laws may include public law numbers that you can use in the reference list entry instead of U.S.C. publication information. Most legal documents are cited in the Bluebook style, the standard citation style used in all disciplines (see The Bluebook Style in The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, 2015). APA refers to the Bluebook style for legal documents and uses these templates and templates in bibliographies. This resource lists some of the most common legal references that APA users may need in their work, but it is not exhaustive. Please note that legal conventions outside the United States may differ. A law that has not been codified (published in the United States Code) must be cited using its public law number and information about where it was published.

The laws and statutes of the various states are cited in a format similar to federal laws, if possible. “U.S.C.” is replaced by an abbreviation for the code of that state, and the titles and sections are represented in the same way. However, some status codes use article or chapter numbers instead of or in addition to section numbers, or do not use headings. ** Note – APA Publication Manual 7th ed. provides only examples based on the legislative bodies of the United States, the House of Representatives (H.R.) and the Senate (S.), both of which must be included in the reference list for a U.S. bill. The following model has been modified for a Canadian context. * The McGill Guide is the standard Canadian citation style and, unlike the APA 7th style, uses italics for case names in the reference citation. Contact your instructor for preferences. www.bclaws.ca/civix/document/id/bills/billsprevious/5th38th:gov07-1 If you are writing an article with many references to legal documents such as laws, legal proceedings and legislative documents, it is strongly advised to consult the Bluebook. In the APA style (7th edition), most legal documents are cited in the standard legal citation style used for legal references in all disciplines. However, the legal style differs significantly from APA style references for other types of sources.

“Section 11: Legal References” summarizes the main difference between APA-style references and legal references, and provides comprehensive guidance on how to cite APA-style legal references, in-text citation forms for legal documents, and examples. [Court and date information is included in the neutral citation, so you don`t add/duplicate this information at the end of your citation – unlike the quote example below] When a law is codified in various non-consecutive sections of the Code, it is also cited using the number of public laws and information about its position in the laws as a whole. The 6th edition of the American Psychological Association Publication Manual (2010) describes the style of citation of legal documents in the Appendix to Chapter 7 (pp. 216– 224). For court decisions, laws, codes and other legal publications, the APA uses the formats described in The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation. Below are format suggestions for common types of legal publications (California and federal sources). If a case was extracted from a library database, reference it as in the print version (as above). If the case was retrieved online, specify the direct URL that follows the country. However, if the law is spread across different sections of the Code or is not included in the code at all, provide the public law number in addition to information about the source where you accessed the law, such as: Format 1 – State Code: (generally preferred format, specifying certain sections in one of the California codes) Adoption Act, R.S.B.C. c.5(1996). www.bclaws.ca. * The McGill Guide is the standard Canadian citation style and, unlike the APA 7th style, uses italics for case names in the reference citation.

The example above combines both the APA for an online source and the McGill Guide for case names in italics.