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The pin cite: what it is and how to check it.

The page after the comma is the part of a citation most often wrong and the part most checkers skip, because checking it needs the opinion’s last page, which the public record did not use to carry.

Written 5 November 2026. Loupe reports what the sources say; it is not legal advice.

What a pin cite is

556 U.S. 662, 678: the opinion begins on page 662 of volume 556 of the United States Reports, and the point is on page 678.

The Bluebook calls it a pinpoint citation and asks for one whenever a brief quotes, paraphrases or relies on a particular part of an authority (Rule 3.2); a span is written with the repeated digits dropped, 678–79. The first page identifies the case; the pin cite is the promise that the proposition lives on that page. A court that turns to the page and finds something else has learned something about the brief.

How it goes wrong

  • A page before the opinion begins

    The pin cite is lower than the first page: a transposed digit, or the page of the case that precedes this one in the volume.

  • A page after it ends

    An opinion that starts at 662 and runs twenty-five pages cannot support a pin cite to 712. This is the error a generator makes most, because it knows first pages and not last ones.

  • A page from the parallel reporter

    The point is on page 1949 of the Supreme Court Reporter, and the brief writes 556 U.S. 662, 1949.

  • The first page again

    662, 662: no pin cite at all, dressed as one.

  • A star page written as a reporter page

    A Westlaw or Lexis star page (*3) belongs to that service’s pagination, not to the reporter’s; written as 662, 3 it points nowhere.

  • A real page that says something else

    Inside the range and still wrong. No lookup catches this one; reading does.

By hand

Find the opinion’s page range, then open the page.

The first page is in the citation. The last page is in the reporter: the page before the next opinion begins. The reporters as scanned by Harvard’s Caselaw Access Project show each opinion with its pages, and CourtListener holds the same scans. With the range in hand, a pin cite outside it is wrong without further reading; a pin cite inside it is read.

The range used to be the hard part. Public databases carried the first page of an opinion and not its last, so a checker could confirm a case existed and still say nothing about the pin cite; the published benchmark of citation checkers (Liu, Stammbach and Henderson, 2026) found pin-cite errors among the categories the tools it tested missed most. For the reporters Harvard scanned, which run to about 2020, the pagination is not missing: it is published, and Loupe reads it. After 2020 the public record does carry fewer page ranges, and a pin cite to a recent case is where a checker most often has to say “not verified”.

What Loupe says about a pin cite

For each case it holds the opinion’s page range, and the report says whether the pin cite falls inside it.

A page outside the range is reported as a defect, with the range the record shows. Where Loupe holds the citation but not the page range for that reporter, the pin cite is reported as not verified, never as clean: the data page shows which reporters carry the ranges. Whether the page supports the proposition is reading, and the report leaves it to you by name. For a quotation with a pin cite, signed in, the quoted words are also compared with the opinion’s text and placed on their printed page.

Check a filing

Paste the brief or drop the file, and Loupe looks up every citation in the published record. It doesn’t generate anything, and what it can’t settle it marks “not verified”, never clean.