APA Style for Referencing Laws

Last October, I posted about antiplagiarism sites. But part of avoiding plagiarism is knowing how to credit your source correctly.

If you follow APA style, the Publication Manual (6th ed.) describes legal references on the Manual's pages 216-224. The APA follows the legal Blue Book or Bluebook. But the APA's nine pages of legal guidelines leave out such sources as state bills that did not become statutes: unenacted legislation.   

For the text of unenacted legislation, I found a library guideline.

It seems that that reference needs four elements: 

• The name of the bill
• Its number (H for house, S for senate), including section number, if any
• The official name of the State's legislative body, including the session, if specified
• The year 

Fictitious Example:
Protection for Motorcyclists and Passengers, H 3409 section 32. South Dakota Legislative Assembly, Session 1, 2004.

The corresponding citation, in the text, would have two elements: the name of the law and the year.

For the many other government documents we must sometimes reference, I found a ten-page guide.  It came from a high school in Idaho, supplied for a senior project.   

Arizona State University has a page with a "citation engine" that will accept your typed-in information and generate a reference--in APA style or MLA style.