[Tex/LaTex] way to not italicize a word in a \textit{} expression

Question

I would like to have a sentence like this:

In the Smith case, the Supreme Court held…

where the entire sentence is in italics except for "Smith" since it is the short name of a case. (You can imagine many other examples like this with movies, etc.)

I would like to be able to do something like:

\textit{In the \textit{Smith} case, the Supreme Court held...}

However, the above code makes everything italics. Is there something I can do to make Smith non-italicized without resorting to the below code?

\textit{In the} Smith \textit{case, the Supreme Court held...}

The only problem I have with that piece of code is that it makes editing problematic if I decide that I'd rather have "Smith" at another place in the sentence.

I appreciate any and all help — even if the help is simply that the solution I want does not exist.

Answer 1

That's exactly what \emph does:

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

\emph{In the \emph{Smith} case, the Supreme Court held\dots}

\end{document}

or, if you prefer to manually control that, then you can use \textup:

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

\textit{In the \textup{Smith} case, the Supreme Court held\dots}

\end{document}