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Referencing guide at the University of Manchester: OSCOLA

This referencing guide is designed to provide support for all referencing requirements at the University of Manchester

What is OSCOLA?

The Oxford University Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities (OSCOLA) is designed to facilitate accurate citation of authorities, legislation, and other legal materials. It is widely used in law schools and by journal and book publishers in the UK and beyond.

Nota bene: This is a footnote style of referencing.

OSCOLA is edited by the Oxford Law Faculty, in consultation with the OSCOLA Editorial Advisory Board.

The information detailed within this webpage is based on the Book:

OSCOLA (4th edn, Hart Publishers) is available in book stores, from Hart Publishers and other online bookstores (ISBN13: 9781849463676).

 

When referencing at Manchester

Whenever you paraphrase or quote a source or use the ideas of another person, you need to cite the source of the material.

  • Insert a footnote marker after the full stop at the end of the sentence or after the word or phrase to which it relates to.
  • At the bottom of the page, note the footnote number and give the full citation.
  • End the footnote with a full stop.

Number your footnotes continuously through your document, starting at 1.

OSCOLA Primary sources

Do not use full stops in abbreviations. Separate citations with a semi-colon.

The following provide examples of how you reference primary sources.

OSCOLA Secondary sources

This guide provides you with examples of how to cite references correctly in the text of your assignments.

OSCOLA does not purport to be comprehensive, but gives rules and examples for the main UK legal primary sources, and for many types of secondary sources. As far as possible, the guidelines in OSCOLA are based on common practice in UK legal citation, but with a minimum of punctuation. When citing materials not mentioned in OSCOLA, use the general principles in OSCOLA as a guide, and try to maintain consistency.

The following provide examples of how you reference secondary sources.

Reference management software & OSCOLA

The OSCOLA style is not available in the EndNote software, But can be downloaded from this page (below).

EndNote Online is free  web-based implementation of EndNote. OSCOLA is one of the styles available when using EndNote Online.

Mendeley is a free reference manager and an academic social network. Manage your research, showcase your work, connect and collaborate with others.

OSCOLA is available as a style to download and add.

To quickly insert a footnote in word use Ctrl-Alt-F then insert your reference.

Further information

University of Oxford provide a faq section on their website supporting OSCOLA enquiries: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/oscola-faqs

Cardiff University provide a thorough tutorial for Citing the law, which will show you how to:

  • Cite cases and legislation, i.e. the ‘primary’ sources of law, in the accepted way
  • Refer to ‘secondary’ sources such as books, journals and government reports in your work
  • Cite using OSCOLA, the Oxford Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities, fourth edition

Cardiff also provide the Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations: This database allows you to search for the meaning of abbreviations for English language legal publications, from the British Isles, the Commonwealth and the United States, including those covering international and comparative law.

Disclaimer

The information contained within these pages is intended as a general referencing guideline.

Please check with your supervisor to ensure that you are following the specific guidelines required by your school.

Creative Commons Licence This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence.

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