AGLC4 Rule 25.1.5.1: Federal Courts

United States Supreme Court decisions carry no court name. Courts of Appeals are identified by their numbered circuit, or as DC Cir or Fed Cir. District courts give the district but never the division: a single district state is D plus the state abbreviation, and a state with several districts adds the district type abbreviation in front. Other federal courts use their usual abbreviation.

AGLC4 page 267

Format

Quoted from the Guide, page 267
D State Abbreviation
Abbreviation of District Type D State Abbreviation

A boxed element is filled in with the source's details; everything outside a box is written exactly as shown.

Formatting

  • No court designation at all for the Supreme Court; the bracket holds only the year.
  • Circuit numbers are ordinals with superscript endings followed by a space and Cir.
  • The District of Columbia Circuit is DC Cir and the Federal Circuit is Fed Cir.
  • District court designations are built from an optional district type abbreviation, a space, D, a space and the state abbreviation.
  • A division of a district is never included, whether abbreviated or written out.
  • State abbreviations come from the table in rule 25.1.5.2.
  • No full stops appear in any court abbreviation.

Examples

Quoted from the Guide, page 267
  1. 15
    Tinker v Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 US 503 (1969). [Not: … (Sup Ct, 1969).]
  2. 16
    Suntrust Bank v Houghton Mifflin Co, 268 F 3d 1257 (11th Cir, 2001).
  3. 17
    Air Line Pilots Association v Federal Express Corporation, 402 F 3d 1245, 1248 (DC Cir, 2005).
  4. 18
    Abbott v Moore Business Forms Inc, 439 F Supp 643 (D NH, 1977).
  5. 19
    Huggins v Fulton, 505 F Supp 7 (MD Tenn, 1980).
  6. 20
    Sheppard v Union Pacific Railroad Co, 357 F Supp 2d 1180 (ED Mo, 2005). [Not: (ED Mo ED, 2005) nor (ED Mo Eastern Division, 2005).]

Not

Quoted from the Guide, page 267
  • … (Sup Ct, 1969).
    the Supreme Court is never named in the bracket
  • (ED Mo ED, 2005)
    the division of a district must not be included
  • (ED Mo Eastern Division, 2005)
    the division must not be included in full either

Forms in the rule

Quoted from the Guide, page 267
  • D Del
  • CD Cal
  • CD Cal ED

District types and their abbreviations

Quoted from the Guide, page 267
District TypeAbbreviation
Northern DistrictND
Southern DistrictSD
Eastern DistrictED
Western DistrictWD
Central DistrictCD
Middle DistrictMD

See also

Check your footnotes against these rules

Paste your paper into the free AGLC4 checker and each footnote is graded against the Guide, with the rule it breaks. To write a citation from scratch, use the AGLC4 citation generator.

AGLC4 citation checker AGLC4 citation generator

Formats, examples, passages, tables and the forms marked Not are quoted from the Australian Guide to Legal Citation (4th ed, Melbourne University Law Review Association, 2018), with the page of the Guide they appear on. Titles, summaries and explanations are our own.