Answered By: Erin McDaniel
Last Updated: Jun 03, 2019     Views: 50689

When citing a federal statute, use the following format:

Name of the Statute, Title number Source § Section number(s) (Year).

An example of a reference page entry is: 

Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, 29 U.S.C. §§ 2601–2654 (2006).

An example of the in text citation would be:

Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (2006)

  • Above example is when the statute is mentioned in the sentence, so only the year is in the ().

(Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, 2006)

  • Include the name and the year if the statute isn't mentioned in the sentence.

The above examples were obtained from the APA Style Blog, which is linked below.

In this case, the IDEA Act was updated in 2004. A copy of the statue with the relevant sections, 1400-1415 is also linked below. Which sections you include in your reference depend on which portions of the act you refer to in your paper.

Also linked is a PDF from UW which lists several examples of citing laws and other government references.

Comments (4)

  1. The links are broken and didn't answer the question
    by Callahan on Aug 04, 2015
  2. Thank you for bringing this to our attention. The answer and links have been updated. Hopefully they are actually helpful now!
    by Erin McDaniel on Aug 05, 2015
  3. Although you indicate that the links are updated, the Washington School of Social Work link does not work.
    by Karen James on Jun 02, 2019
  4. Thanks for bringing out our Karen James! We have updated the broken link--again!
    by Kathryn Park on Jun 03, 2019

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