Learn English – How to Cite a Supreme Court Syllabus in Chicago Style

If (as you indicate) your standard style for a simple citation takes the form "(Source at 5, lines 10–14)," then it seems to me you are bound to extend that form to more-complicated citations, such as "(Source at 5, line 20, through 6, line 2)." Otherwise, you are, in effect, demanding that readers learn two short citation forms that will appear interchangeably in the book. But the ungainliness of the complicated citation's form isn't really the fault of the complicated citation; it's the fault of the underlying simple form.

One of the short-form text citation examples in the 15th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style (at 16.109) involves multiple page references within a particular source. Here's the relevant section:

16.109 Page numbers or other specific references. When a specific page, section, equation or other division of the work is cited, it follows the date, preceded by a comma.

[Examples:] (Piaget 1980, 74) (Johnson 1979, sec. 24) ((Fowler and Hoyle 1965, eq. 87) (Barnes 1998, 2:354–55, 3:29) (Fischer and Siple, 1990, 212n3)

Following the "(Barnes 1998, 2:354–55, 3:29)" form above, you could consistently indicate the relevant pages and lines of your citations by adopting the form "(Source, page:line)." In the usual simple case, this would yield short-form citations that look like this:

(Source, 5:10–14)

In the more complicated cases, it would yield entries such as this:

(Source, 5:20–6:2)

Because a lowercase l looks so much like a 1, I would not add an "l" element to the short form, to avoid making the citations unduly confusing to readers.

The crucial thing in adopting any specialized short-form citation style is to make clear to readers what the elements of the short form are. This is especially true if your short-form style isn't standard at your publisher or in your discipline. The simplest way to introduce such a form is in a note at the beginning of the long-form bibliography, where readers will go in any case when they want to identify a citation in full.

Your link from the LII at Cornell is part of a larger work, Introduction to Basic Legal Citation by Peter W. Martin, which describes how legal sources are cited according to the Harvard Bluebook system in American legal writing— briefs, judicial opinions, and other works by lawyers and judges. This format may differ from the one preferred by the style guide you are following, and you should adhere to the guidance of your style guide and your editor. For what it's worth, however, MLA, APA, and Chicago all seem to stipulate this format for American court cases, and it is the format used by the law reviews and the federal courts.

To simplify, the citation of an American judicial decision generally takes this format:

[Case Name], [Volume of Reporter] [Abbreviated Name of Reporter] [Starting page number of case] ([Abbreviated Name of Court] [Date of Decision]), [electronic source info]

The principal gotcha here is that the case is unpublished (note the NOT TO BE PUBLISHED IN OFFICIAL REPORTS across the top of the document), and so it would not appear in California Appellate Reports, which the official reporter for the California 4th District Court of Appeal, Division 1 (and for all the other California appellate courts). Depending on the court, this could mean that the decision is never to be cited at all in legal writing, although that would not restrict you in other fields. In any case, the fields referring to reporter and page number are not applicable, and instead, a docket number or reference to an electronic source (URL or database name and record number) would take its place. Thus, you will probably see this cited as something like

David L. Riley v. State of California 2013 WL 475242 (Cal. Ct. App. 4th Dist. Feb. 8, 2013)

where 475242 is the Westlaw number according to various blogs, or more compactly

Riley v. California No. D059840 (Cal. Ct. App. 2013)

I cannot speak to the formats used in other systems (whether citations systems or legal systems).