Free Bluebook Citation Generator

What is the Bluebook?

The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation is the standard citation manual for U.S. legal writing. Virtually every American law school, every major law review, and most U.S. courts follow it. The current edition is the 22nd, released June 2025. It defines formats for citing every kind of legal source you'll encounter in a 1L year and beyond: cases, statutes, regulations, law review articles, books, constitutional provisions, court rules, treaties, web sources, and the short forms (id., supra, infra) you use to refer back to a source cited earlier.

What changed in the 22nd edition (June 2025)

Good news first: the formats 1Ls actually use every day, meaning cases, statutes, regulations, books, and law review articles, are essentially unchanged from the 21st edition. The big rewrite happened in Rule 18, which now covers "web-based sources" instead of "internet citations" and grew from 9 subsections to 12:

• Archive links are now required. Citing a webpage now requires an archived version of the page (Perma.cc or the Wayback Machine), appended in brackets after the URL. The 21st edition only encouraged this; the 22nd mandates it. The generator above has a field for it.
• New Rule 18.3: AI-generated content. The Bluebook now has an official rule for citing output from tools like ChatGPT. You must save the output as a screenshot or PDF, and the citation includes a parenthetical saying where that saved copy lives, e.g., "(response to prompt on file with author)."
• New coverage for modern sources. Dedicated treatment for social media posts, streaming audio and video, and other sources the 21st edition handled awkwardly or not at all.

If your legal writing professor or journal still specifies the 21st edition, the citations this tool generates remain correct for the core source types; just leave the archive-link field blank.

How to cite a case in Bluebook format

Rule 10. The anatomy is: Party v. Party, [Volume] [Reporter] [First page]{, pinpoint} ([Court] [Year]).

• Supreme Court: Hanna v. Plumer, 380 U.S. 460 (1965). No court in the parenthetical: the U.S. Reports already implies SCOTUS.
• Federal court of appeals: United States v. Hayes, 555 F.3d 235 (4th Cir. 2009). The circuit goes in the parenthetical.
• Federal district court: Doe v. Smith, 412 F. Supp. 3d 401 (S.D.N.Y. 2019).
• State high court: Lucy v. Zehmer, 84 S.E.2d 516 (Va. 1954). If the reporter doesn't identify the state, the parenthetical does.
• With a pinpoint: Hanna v. Plumer, 380 U.S. 460, 472 (1965). The pinpoint follows the first page after a comma. You can never cite the pinpoint alone.

Case names are italicized, including the "v." Abbreviate party names per Table T6 (Co., Corp., Inc., Ass'n) once you're past the first word of each party.

How to cite a statute in Bluebook format

Rule 12. Federal and state statutes have different shapes:

• Federal: [Title] U.S.C. § [Section] ([Year]). Example: 28 U.S.C. § 1331 (2018). The year is the year of the code edition, not the year the law passed. Every statute citation needs it, even for currently-in-force law.
• Federal with subdivision: 42 U.S.C. § 1983(a)(1) (2018). Subdivisions attach directly to the section number.
• State: [Code name] § [Section] ([Publisher] [Year]). Example: Cal. Civ. Code § 1542 (West 2018). Unofficial codes (West, LexisNexis) get the publisher in the parenthetical; official state codes just get the year.
• Section ranges: double the symbol: §§ 1331–1332.

How to cite a website under the 22nd edition

Rule 18, and this is where the 22nd edition matters most. The shape is: [Author], [Page Title], [Site Name] ([Date]), [URL] [Archived link].

Example: Adam Liptak, Justices Hear Argument on Affirmative Action, N.Y. Times (Mar. 5, 2024), https://www.nytimes.com/... [https://perma.cc/XXXX-XXXX].

• The archived link in brackets is required under the 22nd edition. Perma.cc is the gold standard (most law schools provide accounts); the Wayback Machine works too.
• If the page has no listed author, start with the page title. If it has no date, use the date you last visited: (last visited Sept. 7, 2026).
• Under new Rule 18.3, AI output is its own animal: save a PDF of the response and cite the tool, date, and where your saved copy lives.

When to use full vs. short form

Use the full citation the first time you cite a source in any document. After that, you switch to a short form. The two most common short forms are:

• Id. Use this when the source is the same as the immediately preceding citation. Id. at 472 means the same source, page 472. Id. alone means the same source, same page. Don't use Id. if any other source has been cited in between.
• Supra. Use this to refer back to a source cited earlier in the document but not immediately before. Format: Smith, supra note 5, at 472. The note number refers to the footnote where the source was first cited in full.
• Case short form. For repeated citations to a case, use [Case short name], [vol] [reporter] at [pinpoint]. Example: Hanna, 380 U.S. at 472. The short name is usually the first party (Hanna, not Plumer).

Common Bluebook mistakes

1. Italicizing or not italicizing "v." In Bluebook style, both party names AND the "v." are italicized in the full citation. The older ALWD style left "v." un-italicized; that's wrong under current Bluebook rules. Most law students get this wrong.
2. Missing periods in reporter abbreviations. It's F.3d, not F3d. U.S., not US. S. Ct. with a space and two periods, not SCt.
3. Including court name for SCOTUS cases. When you cite to U.S. Reports, the court name is omitted from the parenthetical, leaving just the year. Hanna v. Plumer, 380 U.S. 460 (1965), not (U.S. 1965) or (SCOTUS 1965).
4. Wrong section symbol. The Bluebook uses §, not "Sec." or "Section." For ranges, double the symbol: §§ 1331–1332.
5. Forgetting the date parenthetical for statutes. Every statute citation needs the year of the code edition, even currently-in-force law. For most federal statutes that means (2018) for U.S.C.
6. Pinpoint without first page. Pinpoints follow the first page, separated by a comma: Hanna v. Plumer, 380 U.S. 460, 472 (1965). You can't cite just to the pinpoint.
7. Using Id. when a different source is in between. Id. only refers to the immediately preceding source. If footnote 5 cites Hanna, footnote 6 cites Erie, and footnote 7 wants to refer back to Hanna, you cannot use Id.; you need Hanna, supra note 5 or the short-form case citation.
8. No archive link on web citations (22nd ed.). The most common new mistake. Under the 22nd edition, a cited webpage needs an archived version in brackets after the URL. Journals will flag this in cite-checking.

Citation examples by source type

The tool above generates each of these. Quick references:

• Case (SCOTUS): Hanna v. Plumer, 380 U.S. 460 (1965).
• Case (federal circuit): United States v. Hayes, 555 F.3d 235 (4th Cir. 2009).
• Federal statute: 28 U.S.C. § 1331 (2018).
• State statute: Cal. Civ. Code § 1542 (West 2018).
• Regulation: 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200 (2024).
• Law review article: John H. Ely, The Wages of Crying Wolf: A Comment on Roe v. Wade, 82 Yale L.J. 920 (1973).
• Book: Erwin Chemerinsky, Constitutional Law 247 (5th ed. 2017).
• Constitution: U.S. Const. art. III, § 2, cl. 1.
• Court rule: Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(6).
• Website (22nd ed.): Adam Liptak, Justices Hear Argument on Affirmative Action, N.Y. Times (Mar. 5, 2024), https://www.nytimes.com/... [https://perma.cc/XXXX-XXXX].

Pair this with case briefs

Citing cases is just one half of the case-law workflow. The other half is reading and understanding the case itself. Case Cub's free case brief library covers 150+ of the most-assigned 1L cases: full structured briefs with facts, procedural posture, holding, rationale, dissents, and key terms. If you're using this generator to format your citations, the briefs are right there to make sure you're actually citing the right case.

Bigger picture: Case Cub is built for the 1L exam grind: interactive case briefs across 30,000+ cases, issue spotters built around your own syllabus, smart flashcards, and outline generators. Try it free.