Referencing and footnoting

Referencing and footnoting your work should, as we noted in the introduction to this chapter, follow whatever guidelines your college or university provides. If you are given a choice of systems to follow, it is important that you follow your chosen system consistently.

We dealt at length with the citation of cases and statutes in Chapter 6. Here we will look at referencing books, articles and Internet resources using both the Oxford Standard Citation of Legal Authorities (OSCOLA, available at www.law.ox.ac.uk/publications/oscola.php) and Harvard system (which, as we shall see in a moment, has no definitive form). OSCOLA, as the name suggests, is a comprehensive guide to legal citation, providing extensive guidance on matters well beyond footnoting and referencing. Many institutions use variants on OSCOLA or the Harvard system. For example, some colleges and universities use a variant on Harvard citation, recommending the use of double rather than single quotation marks for the title of a journal article, whereas other institutions advise using single quotation marks. The examples below follow the OSCOLA system precisely (which is possible, since a definitive version is available), and (since no definitive version exists) the British Standards Institution interpretation of the Harvard system (BS 5605:1990 Recommendations for citing and referencing published material). The OSCOLA system uses numbered footnotes and the OSCOLA illustrations in the citations below would appear consecutively numbered throughout the essay at the bottom of the relevant page. The Harvard system uses brief citations within the body text and provides the full citation in a reference list at the end of the work. An example of a short paragraph, which includes a direct quotation from a book, illustrates the different approaches. Taking OSCOLA first:

When speaking of the ratio decidendi of a case it is tempting to think in terms of a fixed and single entity with an objective and continuing existence, which merely needs to be located and identified, just as a treasure hunter may seek to locate and identify a sunken wreck within a given area of the seabed.

The Harvard system, on the other hand would produce:

When speaking of the ratio decidendi of a case it is tempting to think in terms of a fixed and single entity with an objective and continuing existence, which merely needs to be located and identified, just as a treasure hunter may seek to locate and identify a sunken wreck within a given area of the seabed. As we shall see in the remainder of this chapter, however, this model is seriously misleading. (McLeod 2013 p. 142).

Whichever system of citation you use, the same basic information must be included. When citing books you need to include the author’s name (or authors’ names), the title of the book (in italics), the edition, publisher, place and date of publication and, if quoting directly from the work or referring to a specific point, the relevant page number. The OSCOLA system discourages the use of full stops and commas in citations and includes the full reference in a numbered footnote at the bottom of the page. This would be footnote 1 from the example given above:

¹Ian McLeod, Legal Method (9th edn, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2013) 142

The same citation using the Harvard system would not include the page number, since this is cited in the short reference in the main body of the text. The full reference would be included in a reference list at the end of the work and could be cited thus:

McLeod, I., 2013. Legal Method. 9th edn. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

The basic information for journal articles is the author’s name (or authors’ names), the title of the article (in single quotation marks) and the year, volume and page reference of the article. Most law journals have preferred abbreviations of the journal title. The OSCOLA system encourages the use of the standard abbreviations where possible. An example of an OSCOLA journal article citation, from the New Law Journal, is:

JR Spencer, ‘Retrial for reckless infection’ (2004) 154 NLJ 762

The Harvard citation for this article could use either the accepted abbreviation, as in the OSCOLA form, or the full title of the journal, with the latter appearing thus:

Spencer J.

Internet resources often provide very little citable information and frequently disappear into cyberspace as quickly as they appeared online. Include the author (if identified), the title of the article or the title of the page, the URL and the date the resource was accessed. In OSCOLA this would be:

Richard Garner, ‘Electronic tags used to beat the A-level cheats’ The Independent (London, 11 May 2007) accessed 14 May 2007

A Harvard style citation could be:

Garner, R. (2007, 11 May) ‘Electronic tags used to beat the A-level cheats’ (The Independent ), Available: http://education.independent.co.uk/news/article2530771.ece (Accessed: 2007, 14 May).

Footnoting and referencing, like grammar that follows standard conventions, makes your work easier to read. Inconsistent footnoting and referencing in your work will undermine your attempts to create a well-presented composition and give the impression that your work is the product of an erratic and disorganised mind. Finally, it is worth repeating that full referencing and citation is also fundamental to avoiding allegations of plagiarism.