How to cite a legal case in APA 6
A court decision or legal judgment. Previous APA edition — still required by some journals and older style guides.
Quick answer
To cite a legal case in APA 6, include the author(s), year, title, and container or publisher details. A concrete example is below.
Example
Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 ___ (Supreme Court of the United States 1954).
This example is rendered with the official CSL definition for APA 6. For the exact style required by your journal, paste your references into DEEPNOTIS and pick that style from the dropdown — the app covers 2,800+ variants.
What you need
For a legal case, APA 6 expects these fields at minimum:
- Case name
- Year
- Reporter volume and page
- Court
- Jurisdiction
Common mistakes
- Using title case for article titles. APA uses sentence case for everything except the journal name.
- Spelling out author first names. APA 7 uses initials (e.g. 'Smith, J.'), not full given names.
- Forgetting the DOI. When a DOI exists, most styles now require it (usually as a full https://doi.org/… URL).
- Inconsistent capitalization. APA uses sentence case for titles; MLA and Chicago use title case. Mixing them is the single most common style error.
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Last updated: 5 May 2026