Oxford Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities

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The Oxford University Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities (OSCOLA) is a style guide that provides the modern method of legal citation in the United Kingdom; the style itself is also referred to as OSCOLA. First developed by Peter Birks of the University of Oxford Faculty of Law, and now in its 4th edition (2012, Hart Publishing, ISBN   978-1-84946-367-6), [1] it has been adopted by most law schools and many legal publishers in the United Kingdom. An online supplement (developed for the third edition) is available for the citation of international legal cases, not covered in the main guide. [2]

Contents

Cases

Cases are to be cited with as little punctuation as possible in the names or the report names. If there is a neutral citation, [3] which is generally the case after 2001 or 2002, it should be cited before the "best" report: the Law Reports (AC, QB, Ch etc.), or the WLR or the All ER, after a comma.

The year is put in square brackets if the report uses dates to identify volumes; otherwise round brackets give the date of the judgment. For example, the All England Reports are identified by year then volume, meaning they should be cited as, for example, "[2005] 1 All ER". [4]

When something is cited for a second time, an abbreviation can be used. In a footnote referring back to a particular page and another footnote, this would be,

This parenthetical reference to a prior note or page may be disrupted if an editor inserts a new reference in the article before the reference of the parenthetical.

For European Union cases,

For European Court of Human Rights cases,

Journals and books

Journal articles, books etc. should be cited with the author's name as shown in the work being cited. If a journal title is abbreviated, it should follow the guide in the appendix, which includes some standard abbreviations including specific journals, law reports and some authoritative books (e.g. J for Journal, Crim for Criminal, Bl Comm for Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England ); in all cases the abbreviations do not have full stops. If the journal does not have consecutive volume numbers, the year should be shown in square brackets, as in the second example.

Books follow a similar pattern. Note the order is Author, Title (Edition, Publisher Year) page.

If a title and a subtitle have nothing in between, a colon should be used to separate them. A chapter in an edited book would be cited as follows.

Legislation

UK legislation should be cited by short title, always written in roman with the year at the end, with no comma before it. The section is abbreviated with no full stops.

Older statutes (e.g. those for which no official short title exists) may be cited by regnal year and chapter where this is considered helpful.

EU legislation should be as follows.

Hansard and parliamentary reports

Parliamentary debates are cited by reference to Hansard date, volume and column. Debates in Parliament are cited "HC Deb" or "HL Deb" for the Commons and Lords respectively, while committee debates use the name of the committee in roman, followed by the title of the report in italics. As with other citations, number ranges should be abbreviated to as few digits as possible, to a minimum of two.

See also

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References

  1. "Oxford University Standard for the Citation of Legal Authorities" (PDF). Oxford University Faculty of Law. 2012. Retrieved 6 January 2022.
  2. "OSCOLA 2006: Citing International Law Sources Section" (PDF). Law.Ox.ac.uk. Faculty of Law, University of Oxford. 2006. Archived (PDF) from the original on 8 June 2017. Retrieved 3 December 2017.
  3. "Citations". British and Irish Legal Information Institute . Retrieved 26 September 2024.
  4. "Cases (UK)". OSCOLA referencing guide. University of Northampton. Retrieved 2022-03-09.

Further reading