The Indigo Book: A Manual of Legal Citation is a free version of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, a popular legal citation style used in the United States. The Bluebook was created by the editors of the Columbia Law Review, the Harvard Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Yale Law Review in the editing of law review articles for their respective publications. The first two chapters of the Bluebook, printed on blue paper, is an introduction to legal citation developed for practitioners and law clerks, thus the name of the Indigo Book.
Consult the table of contents to find the legal resource type being cited. The table of contents is hyperlinked, so click on the chapter needed (for example, Cases). View the instructions and examples to create a Bluebook-style citations.
Published court opinions appear chronologically in case reporters for the case jurisdiction. The citation consists of the volume number of the case reporter, an abbreviation for the case reporter, and the page number where the opinion begins in the reporter.
A jurisdiction's statutes are codified -- placed in a subject arrangement -- annually. Each broad legal topic is assigned a Title. Statues are then arranged in sections within that title. A citation for a statute is composed of the title number, the abbreviation for the jurisdiction's Code, a section symbol and number for the section cited, and the year of the edition of the code being cited.
