How to Cite a Statute or Regulation in Plain English

Short answer: a legal citation is a short address for one piece of law. "42 U.S.C. § 1983" means title 42 of the United States Code, section 1983. To cite a statute (a law passed by a legislature), write the volume number, the abbreviated name of the code, then the section number. After that, check the section is still in force, because laws get amended, renumbered and repealed.

TL;DR

• A citation has three parts: which volume, which set of books, which section. It works like a street, a city and a house number.
• Federal statutes live in the U.S. Code (U.S.C.). Federal regulations live in the Code of Federal Regulations (C.F.R.). Each state has its own code with its own habits.
• The form of a citation changes from state to state. Some states write the code name first, some last, and some write it as a single abbreviation.
• Most citation errors come from a stale copy, a repealed section or a number that moved. Open the official source and read the date before you rely on a cite.

What is a legal citation?

A legal citation is a standard way to point at one specific law, rule or court decision, so that anyone can find the same words you found. It is the legal version of a postal address.

Most citations to written law carry three pieces:

1. The title or chapter: the volume, like a street.
2. The code: the set of books the volume belongs to, like a city. A code is all the statutes on all subjects, arranged by topic.
3. The section: the exact provision, like a house number.

The sign § is the section symbol. Two of them (§§) means more than one section.

How to read legal citations: six real examples

Here are six citations, one for each kind of written law you are likely to meet.

A few of those terms need a plain meaning. A regulation is a rule written by a government agency to carry out a statute. A session law is a law as first published, in the order it passed, before editors fold it into the code. Guidance is an agency explaining how it reads the law. It tells you what the agency thinks, and it is not law itself.

Notice the dot in 778.105. That is part 778, section 105. Regulations often use a part and a section where statutes use one number.

How to cite the US Code

The pattern is the title number, then "U.S.C.", then the section sign, then the section number: 42 U.S.C. § 1983. Formal legal writing often adds the year of the edition in parentheses at the end. The Office of the Law Revision Counsel of the House of Representatives publishes the Code, and govinfo.gov hosts official editions.

To point deeper, add the subsection in parentheses: 42 U.S.C. § 1983(b)(2) points at a smaller piece inside the same section.

How to cite the CFR

The pattern is the title number, "C.F.R.", the section sign, then the part and section: 29 C.F.R. § 778.105. This one is the Department of Labor's rule on overtime pay, and it defines an employee's workweek as "a fixed and regularly recurring period of 168 hours." The official text is on the eCFR site.

The C.F.R. is reissued in annual editions. The eCFR updates much faster, but its own help page calls it an informational resource, so the annual edition remains the formal text. A careful cite names the edition year.

How to cite a state statute

Take a rule most businesses care about, a data breach notice. Tex. Bus. & Com. Code § 521.053(b) says a person who owns computerized data with sensitive personal information must tell affected people about a breach "not later than the 60th day after the date on which the person determines that the breach occurred." The sentence has exceptions, and the full section is on the Texas Legislature's site.

Read the cite piece by piece. "Tex." is the state. "Bus. & Com. Code" is the code, and Texas has dozens of separate codes, so the name does real work. "521.053" is the section number, and its first three digits, 521, name the chapter.

The history note at the foot of that section lists the session laws that changed it. The latest listed is the Acts of 2023 in the table above (Chapter 246, S.B. 768), effective September 1, 2023. That is how a session law cite ties back to the code section it amended.

Citation form is different in every state

You will see the "Bluebook" mentioned in guides like this one. The Bluebook is a style manual that many US law schools and courts use. It is not the law, and states are free to write citations their own way. Three states show how far they can differ:

• Kentucky labels its own statutes with the letters KRS and a number, like KRS 13A.020, with no state name. See how to find and cite Kentucky law.
• Idaho puts the number first and the code after it, and spells out the word section: "section 67-5291, Idaho Code." See how to find and cite Idaho law.
• South Dakota writes it in a statute. SDCL 2-16-18 says the code may be cited as "SDCL" followed by the number of the title, chapter or section. See how to find and cite South Dakota law.

If your citation is going to a court, read that court's own rules first. If it is going into a contract or a policy, use the form the state itself uses.

What goes wrong with citations

1. A stale copy. A cached page or a PDF from three years ago may show text that has since changed. The cite is right and the words under it are not.
2. A repealed section. The number still looks fine in your old document. The law is gone.
3. A number that moved. Legislatures renumber. The Texas Legislative Council says its periodic code update bills include renumbering duplicate official citations, which is why our Texas guide warns that a Texas number can move out from under you.
4. Two versions at once. Kentucky's own site can list two texts under one KRS number, one marked effective until a date and the next marked effective from it. A bare cite names neither.
5. Guidance treated as law. An opinion letter helps you predict what an agency will do. A court does not have to follow it.

How to check that a citation is current

1. Open the official site for that jurisdiction. A law firm blog or a copy of a copy can lag behind.
2. Find the date the page says it is current through.
3. Read the history note under the section. It lists every amendment.
4. Look for the words repealed, renumbered, transferred, or effective on.
5. For a regulation, check the agency's page for newer changes.
6. Write down the date you checked next to your own cite.

Software can do the first match for you. Vaquill AI's citation resolver takes a citation and returns the section it names, with a link to the official source. If a cite does not match, it comes back as unverified. That means "not confirmed", never "current", so step 2 still applies. Our guide to verifying AI legal citations shows why this matters when a chatbot hands you a cite.

This guide is part of US Law Data: The Complete Guide, a map of where US law comes from and how to use it.

FAQ

How do I cite a statute? Write the title or chapter, then the name of the code, then the section sign and the section number. For federal law that gives 42 U.S.C. § 1983. For a state, use the state's own code name and form, such as Tex. Bus. & Com. Code § 521.053.

What does § mean in a citation? It is the section sign. It stands for the word section. Two of them (§§) means more than one section.

What is the difference between U.S.C. and C.F.R.? U.S.C. is the United States Code, which holds statutes passed by Congress. C.F.R. is the Code of Federal Regulations, which holds the rules federal agencies write to carry those statutes out. A statute usually points to the regulations that fill in its details.

Do I have to use the Bluebook? Only if the court or publisher you are writing for asks for it. For internal documents, any clear form that lets a reader find the exact section works. For a state's own law, the state's form is usually the safest.

How do I know a section has not been repealed? Read it on the official site and check the history note and the date. A section that has been repealed is marked as such. If you cannot find it, treat that as a warning and do not assume it is still there.

Can I just paste a citation into a tool to check it? A tool can match the cite to the official text and flag one that matches nothing. You still read the section and check its date before you rely on it.

If you want the data behind this guide, the US primary law API serves statutes and regulations by citation.

Priyansh Khodiyar

Co-Founder & CTO

Priyansh leads engineering and AI at Vaquill AI: the pipelines that pull statutes, regulations and court rules from every US jurisdiction's official publisher, and the REST API, MCP server and open dataset that serve them.