ALWD Citation Guide: How to Cite in ALWD Style

An ALWD citation looks exactly like a Bluebook citation. That is the single most useful thing to know about the ALWD Guide to Legal Citation: since its fifth edition the Guide has been written to produce the same output as The Bluebook, and the current eighth edition (Aspen Publishing, spring 2026, edited by Carolyn V. Williams) states that the citations that result from using it are identical to those in the twenty-second edition of The Bluebook. What differs is how the rules are taught, how they are numbered, and a handful of house-style choices. This guide gives you the formats, the worked examples, and the places where an ALWD-trained writer and a Bluebook-trained writer will still disagree.

What the ALWD Guide is, and which edition you have

ALWD is the Association of Legal Writing Directors. Its Guide started life in 2000 as the ALWD Citation Manual, edited by Darby Dickerson, and for its first four editions it deliberately departed from the Bluebook on several points of form (full journal names, no comma after some case names, a different treatment of publisher information). Those departures are why older library guides still list "ALWD vs. Bluebook" differences that no longer exist. The fifth edition (2014) dropped them and brought the output into line with the Bluebook; every edition since has kept it there.

The edition matters because the rule numbers changed in 2026:

Aspen's product page lists the eighth edition's publication date as April 17, 2026; the University of Akron law library's guide records it as published May 12, 2026. Either way, a class that started in autumn 2026 is likely on the eighth edition, and a syllabus written in 2025 is on the seventh. If your professor refers to "Rule 12" for cases, that is seventh-edition numbering. Akron's guide publishes a chart of where each seventh-edition section moved; the relocations it lists include Rule 1.4 (large and small capitals) to Chapter 8, Rules 11.1(d), 11.4(d), 11.4(e) and 11.5(c) (full citations, supra and hereinafter in academic footnotes) to Chapter 18, and Rule 12.16(g) (short citations to cases in academic footnotes) to Chapter 19.

Rule numbers in the rest of this post are seventh-edition numbers unless marked, because that is what the published library guides and the Appendix 8 cross-reference use. Where an eighth-edition chapter is known, it is given too.

A few courts require ALWD by local rule. Wikipedia lists the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, the District Court for the District of Montana and the Bankruptcy Court for the District of Montana; check the court's own rules before relying on that list, because local citation rules change and Appendix 2 of the Guide exists to point you at them.

The official ALWD rule for a case citation

A full citation to a case has the same components in ALWD and the Bluebook: the case name, the reporter volume, the reporter abbreviation, the first page, the pinpoint page, and a parenthetical with the court (where the reporter does not already identify it) and the year. The seventh edition covers cases in Rule 12; the eighth moves them to Chapter 19.

Format:

Case Name, Volume Reporter First Page, Pinpoint (Court Year).

Example:

Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 495 (1954).

The typeface rule (Rule 1 in the seventh edition) is the one beginners get wrong most. In a brief, memo or other practice document the case name is italicised or underlined; the reporter and the parenthetical are in ordinary roman type. ALWD, like the Bluepages of the Bluebook, treats the two as interchangeable but tells you to pick one and hold it for the whole document. Italics are the norm in anything produced in a word processor; underlining survives mainly in court rules written in the typewriter era.

Two mechanical rules from the same chapter that catch people: there is no space between adjacent single capitals ("U.S.", not "U. S.") and ordinals are never superscripted ("7th Cir.", not "7ᵗʰ Cir.").

Because the Supreme Court's official reporter, U.S., identifies the court on its own, the parenthetical carries only the year. A federal appellate case needs the circuit in the parenthetical:

Anderson v. Creighton, 483 U.S. 635, 640 (1987).

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United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 926 (1984).

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Smith v. City of Jackson, 351 F.3d 183, 187 (5th Cir. 2003).

For a Supreme Court case too recent for U.S., the fallback order (the same in both systems) is S. Ct., then L. Ed. 2d, then a database cite. For the reporter hierarchy in detail, and the difference between an official and a West reporter, our Supreme Court case guide for the Bluebook applies unchanged to ALWD.

Worked examples

1. A federal statute

Statutes are Rule 14 in the seventh edition. The pattern is the title number, the code abbreviation, the section symbol and number, and the year of the code edition in parentheses.

42 U.S.C. § 1983 (2018).

A span of sections doubles the symbol:

42 U.S.C. §§ 12101-12213 (2018).

A subsection hangs off the section number without a space:

26 U.S.C. § 501(c)(3) (2018).

Cite the official code (U.S.C.) when it has the current text. If you are citing an annotated commercial code, the publisher goes in the parenthetical with the year: U.S.C.A. takes "(West year)" and U.S.C.S. takes "(LexisNexis year)". Note the house-style difference here: ALWD writes "Lexis" rather than the all-capitals "LEXIS" found in older Bluebook material, and it asks you to name the specific database version, so "Westlaw Edge" or "Westlaw Classic" rather than a bare "Westlaw" when the distinction matters. Our federal statute guide walks through session laws and popular names; the forms are the same under ALWD.

2. A constitutional provision

U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 3.

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U.S. Const. amend. XIV, § 1.

No date, because the Constitution is cited as currently in force. A state constitution follows the same shape with the state abbreviation: "Mont. Const. art. II, § 10."

3. A law review article

The author's full name as it appears on the article, the title in italics, the volume, the abbreviated journal name, the first page, a pinpoint if you need one, and the year.

Charles A. Reich, The New Property, 73 Yale L.J. 733, 737-38 (1964).

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Cass R. Sunstein, Incompletely Theorized Agreements, 108 Harv. L. Rev. 1733, 1739 (1995).

The journal abbreviations come from the Guide's Appendix 5, which ALWD publishes free online so it can be updated between print editions. Older ALWD editions spelled out journal names in full ("Harvard Law Review"); that rule is gone, and a library guide that still tells you to spell them out is describing the fourth edition or earlier.

4. A book or treatise

Author, title in italics, the page or section you are citing, then a parenthetical with the edition and year. A multi-volume treatise puts the volume number first.

Lawrence Lessig, Code: Version 2.0 45 (2006).

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2 Joseph M. Perillo & Helen Hadjiyannakis Bender, Corbin on Contracts § 1.1 (1993).

Two authors are joined with an ampersand. For an edition after the first, the edition goes inside the parenthetical before the year: "(3d ed. 2004)". The Guide's "Fast Formats" page at the top of each source rule shows a filled-in example for each of these variants; that is the page to look at before you hunt through the subsections.

5. A website

A website citation names the author if there is one, the page title in italics, the site name, the full URL, and a date. Under the eighth edition, which mirrors Bluebook 22nd, an archived copy of the URL is required rather than merely encouraged, because Bluebook Rule 18.2.1(d) now demands that cited online content be captured in a permanent form. Put the archive link in brackets after the live URL.

Replevin, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/replevin [https://perma.cc/ZK5T-FHZA] (last visited June 18, 2025).

Use "(last visited Month Day, Year)" only when the page itself carries no date. If the page is dated, use that date and drop "last visited".

6. A case cited from Westlaw or Lexis

An unreported decision takes the docket number, the database identifier, and a parenthetical with the court and the full date.

Doe v. Roe, No. 2:21-cv-00123, 2022 WL 123456, at *3 (D. Mont. Mar. 4, 2022).

"Doe v. Roe" and the numbers here are placeholders to show the shape; substitute the real docket and database numbers from the decision's header. The pinpoint in a database cite uses "at *3" with a star, because an unreported decision has no reporter pages and the database assigns its own.

7. A short citation after the full one

Rule 11 governs short forms in the seventh edition (academic-footnote parts moved to Chapter 18 in the eighth). Rule 11.1(c) requires a full citation only the first time you cite a source; after that you may use a short form as long as the reader can still identify the source.

Brown, 347 U.S. at 495.

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Id. at 498.

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Reich, supra, at 740.

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§ 1983.

Id. refers to the immediately preceding citation and nothing else; once another source intervenes, go back to the named short form. Supra is for books, articles and other secondary sources, never for cases or statutes. Our guide to Id., supra and hereinafter covers the sequencing rules, and they are the same under ALWD.

Where ALWD and the Bluebook still differ

The citations match. The rules about when and where to put them do not, and this is where an ALWD-trained associate and a Bluebook-trained editor will argue.

Placement of a citation when the case name is in the sentence. Bluebook Rule B10.1.1(vi) wants the whole citation inside the sentence when you name the case in your text. ALWD Rule 34.1(c) permits you to leave the citation until the end of the sentence even then. So in a brief written to ALWD:

In Brown, the Court rejected the separate-but-equal doctrine in public education. Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 495 (1954).

is correct, and under strict Bluepages practice the citation would have to sit after "Brown," mid-sentence.

One citation for a whole paragraph. ALWD Rule 34.2 has an exception the Bluebook does not: if every sentence in a paragraph draws on the same page of the same source, one citation at the end of the paragraph is enough. Bluebook B10.2 asks for a citation after every sentence that relies on a source. If you write for a Bluebook-reading supervisor, cite every sentence; nobody was ever marked down for that.

Full citation frequency. ALWD Rule 11.1(c) says a full citation is needed only on the first reference. The Bluebook ties the short form to whether the full citation appears "in the same general discussion" and remains clear. In a long memo this can mean an ALWD writer uses a short form where a Bluebook writer would repeat the full cite after a section break.

Practice documents versus law reviews. The Bluebook is two books: Bluepages for practitioners and Whitepages for academic writing, with different typefaces (law review footnotes use large and small capitals for authors and books). ALWD is written for practice documents first and marks the academic variations inside each rule with an "Academic Formatting" icon. In the eighth edition the academic typeface rules live in Chapter 8 and the academic footnote rules in Chapter 18. If you are writing a law review note, you still need those sections.

House style. ALWD writes "email" where the Bluebook writes "e-mail", and "Lexis" where older Bluebook editions wrote "LEXIS". Neither will cost you a mark, but a journal's citation editor may change them.

The explanations. The practical reason law schools assign ALWD is pedagogical. Each source rule opens with a Fast Formats table of finished examples, each rule has Sidebars explaining why the rule exists and how it is commonly broken, and the eighth edition adds a foundational rule on why writers cite at all. The Bluebook assumes you already know.

Special cases

Citing generative AI output

New Rule 42 in the eighth edition is the first ALWD rule on generative AI, and it draws a line the Bluebook's rewritten Rule 18 draws in parallel: acknowledging that you used an AI tool in producing a document is a different act from citing AI output as a source. If you must cite an output (for example, in a dispute about what a tool said), save a PDF of the exchange and cite the saved copy; a live chat link is not a citable source because nobody can retrieve the same text from it. Most courts that address AI in their local rules ask for a disclosure statement, which belongs in the document, not in a citation.

Citing a case from a jurisdiction that requires public-domain citation

Some state courts assign their own vendor-neutral citation (for example, a year, court abbreviation and sequential decision number) and require it in filings. Both ALWD and the Bluebook tell you to give the public-domain citation first and the regional reporter citation in parallel. Appendix 2 of the Guide links to each state's local citation rules, and it is the one appendix you should check before filing anything in an unfamiliar court.

A source with no rule

Neither Guide covers everything. When nothing fits, both systems say the same thing: find the rule for the closest analogous source, follow it, and include enough information for a reader to locate the source. Say what the thing is in a parenthetical if the form alone would not make it obvious.

Parallel citations and pinpoints to a pinpoint

If a court requires a parallel citation (say, to both an official state reporter and the regional reporter), give the pinpoint in each:

State v. Jones, 300 Mont. 100, 105, 3 P.3d 600, 604 (2000).

The case name and numbers here are illustrative. Pinpoints go after each first page, and the court parenthetical comes once, at the end.

Common mistakes and how to avoid them

• Citing "Rule 12" to an eighth-edition reader, or "Chapter 19" to a seventh-edition reader. Name the edition when you name a rule; the Guide's own correlation chart exists because this confusion is expected.
• Following a pre-2014 library guide and spelling out "Harvard Law Review" or dropping the comma after a case name. Those are first-to-fourth-edition rules. Current ALWD abbreviates journal names per Appendix 5 and matches Bluebook punctuation.
• Using supra for a case. Supra is for secondary sources. A case takes the named short form: Brown, 347 U.S. at 495.
• Using Id. after an intervening citation. Id. points only to the citation immediately before it. If anything else was cited in between, even in a footnote, use the named short form.
• Omitting the archived link on a URL. The eighth edition, like Bluebook 22nd, requires one. Perma.cc is the tool most law schools provide; the Wayback Machine is acceptable if your school does not.
• Superscripting ordinals because Word did it for you. Turn off automatic superscript in AutoCorrect before you start a brief; "2d Cir." and "7th Cir." are plain text.
• Putting a space in "U.S." or "F.3d". Adjacent single capitals close up. Abbreviations that contain a longer word, like "F. Supp. 2d" or "So. 2d", keep their spaces.
• Mixing italics and underlining in one document. Either is permitted; mixing them is not.

Quick-reference table

In a practice document the short forms for secondary sources use supra without a note number, because there are no numbered footnotes. In a law review footnote the same short form becomes "Reich, supra note 12, at 740."