About Citation Coach
Citation Coach is a free Bluebook (22d ed.) citation generator and checker for law students, law review editors, practitioners and anyone else who has to get a legal citation right. It covers 77 source types, from cases, statutes and regulations to treaties, Tribal law, films, podcasts and AI prompts, in both the Bluepages form used in court documents and the Whitepages form used in law reviews.
What you can do with it
- Generate a citation. Choose a source type, fill in what you know, and get the citation with the rule behind each part of it.
- Check a citation. Paste one you have written. The checker says what is wrong, which rule says so, and what the corrected form is.
- Check a whole set of footnotes. Paste them in order. Short forms such as id. and supra are checked against the footnotes around them.
Every source type has its own page with worked examples, the elements the citation needs, the mistakes the checker catches, and the rules that govern it. See all 77 source types.
How it is built
Every abbreviation table, reporter and rule number the tool uses is extracted from the rule text by a program, not typed in from memory, and regenerated whenever the source changes. Every rule number the tool shows you is checked to be a real heading.
How it is tested
The tool is tested on every change against a hand-verified corpus of 278 citations and against all 1,767 of the Bluebook’s own printed examples. The number of printed examples it accepts may only go up. Where a printed example conflicts with a rule or table, the conflict is recorded rather than hidden.
What it will not do
Where the Bluebook's own forms are genuinely ambiguous, the tool says so rather than guess. A magazine article and a newspaper article are the same shape, and only the periodical's identity separates them. Some citations, such as a short form, can only be judged against the footnotes before them. In those cases you get an explanation, not a confident wrong answer.
It is a drafting aid, not legal advice. Always check a citation against The Bluebook itself and your court's local rules before you file or publish it.
Contact
Corrections, a citation the tool gets wrong, or a source type you would like added: [email protected]. See also the contact page.