How are criminal cases and civil cases cited? 

When a criminal case is cited, it is almost always written as R v and then the defendant's name such as R v Dudley and Stevens. If you are interested, R v Dudley and Stevens, which I should actually really say R against Dudley and Stevens, is a case from 1884 that I bet you, still even today, every single law student and lawyer in England and Wales will have heard of it because it's a compulsory case to study in the criminal law module in an undergraduate law degree.

It's a gruesome case which involved survivors of a shipwreck who tragically resorted to cannibalism eating a crew member in order to survive and who were subsequently convicted of murder. Apparently the case inspired Monty Python's controversial lifeboat sketch, in case you are a Monty Python fan. The R in criminal cases stands for Regina or Rex, AKA, the monarch, the crown, the Queen, or the king.

And when spoken, we sometimes say R or also the Crown. The v when spoken in British English is said as against or and. But in the US people often say versus. So R v Dudley and Stevens becomes the Crown against Dudley and Stevens or the Crown and Dudley and Stevens, if you are speaking to British English speakers.

In the United States of America, the way we read the criminal case name depends on where the case is being prosecuted. You might see, The people v., State v., or Commonwealth v., And federal criminal cases are United States v. the defendant, which is often abbreviated to US v. the defendant. 

Civil cases, on the other hand, are a little bit different, generally they don't involve the state, but rather individuals, and therefore we get cases being reported with the claimants and defendant's surnames or the names of the companies or institutions involved.

For example, Donoghue v Stevenson or Donoghue against Stevenson, a famous tort case from 1932, which laid the foundations for the modern law on negligence and which involved a lady who much to her dismay, found a decomposed rotting snail in her bottle of ginger beer whilst she was enjoying the beverage. Another famous civil law case is Carlisle v Carbolic Smokeball Co. 1893. This is not a tort case like the former, but instead a case which all LLB students study in contract law. It is a leading contract law case in which the Court of Appeal explored the four key elements of a legally binding contract, and it remains relevant even today.

Quiz