A common challenge for law students is getting equipped with OSCOLA referencing. It might sound tough. However, it’s all about using the correct formatting when you want to reference Articles, Books, Cases, etc.,
As law students, you will see whether you are engaging with academic legal material, and then you will research yourself. When you include someone else’s article or work in your essay, it doesn’t mean that you are copying. It means reading to find what is relevant to the argument that you are making. Following the correct way of quoting or paraphrasing and explaining how the source you are using is useful to your argument in illustrating or evidencing. By referencing you are showing that thinking is relevant to the academic legal discussion of the topic.
What is OSCOLA Referencing
You need to include different information from different sources.
For Book:
Author, Title (Edition, Publisher Date)
Example: Tom Bingham, The Rule of Law (1st ed, Penguin Books Ltd 2015)
For Journal Articles:
Author, “Title” Journal title Volume (Issue) (Date): Page numbers
Example: Kate Hofmeyr, “The problem of private entrapment”. Criminal Law Review (2006):319
For Statutes:
Short Title – Date
Example: Consumer Rights Act 2015
For Cases:
Case name – Neutral citation
Example: URS Corporation Ltd v BDW Trading Ltd (2024) UKSC 0042
For Website:
Author, ‘Article Title’ (Date) Website Title <URL> accessed date.
Olivia Hamlyn, ‘Economic Imaginaries and Environmental Regulation’ (2024) Modern Law Review < https://www.modernlawreview.co.uk/september-2024/economic-imaginaries-and-environmental-regulation/> accessed date 27 November 2024
How to insert references to your document
We have sentences where we want to add our citations to
- The 1st one refers to a Book by Tom Bingham, go to the end of the reference, and insert the footer after the full stop. Click on ‘References’ on top of the Word Document, select ‘Insert Footnote’, a footer opens at the bottom of the page, and copy/paste the citation there.
“Bingham quotes David Cole from 2003: With a stroke of the pen, in other words, President Bush denied foreign nationals basic rights of political association, political speech, due process, and privacy.”
- The 2nd one refers to an Article by Kate Hofmeyr, again follow the same procedure, go to the end of reference, and after the full stop, insert the footnote.
“Kate Hofmeyr wrote an article about Private entrapment cases where the accused claims to have been entrapped 1 into committing the offense with which he is charged by a private party, such as a journalist, whose actions were in no way authorised, supervised, or endorsed (at least at the time of their commission) by the police or prosecuting authority.”
- The 3rd one is the Case, where right after the Case title, you need to insert the footnote.
“The case of URS Corporation Ltd v BDW Trading Ltd, where the respondent had discovered the defects after having sold the developments to third parties. It nonetheless performed remedial works to rectify the defects, the cost of which forms the basis of the losses the respondent claims against the appellant.”
- The 4th one is the Statute, ‘Consumer Rights Act 2015’, we need not put a footnote. You can just leave that as text.
“Hire-purchase agreements for goods, as they apply between a trader and a consumer. This is consistent with the definitions in section 189 of the Consumer Credit Act 1974 and section 15 of the SGITA, save that it applies only to trader-to-consumer contracts”
- The 5th one is a Website, again we need to put the citation in the footnote.
“Taking EU pesticide policy and regulation as a case study and drawing on theory regarding the performative power of imaginaries, this piece identifies economic imaginaries expressed in EU policy and demonstrates how those imaginaries have shaped that policy to pursue economic growth and competitiveness. ”
In case of repeated citation, you can use ‘ibid followed by the paragraph number that we are referring to’
Example: ibid 131
There is another repeated reference, the reference that we looked at earlier on. In this case, we can do a cross reference. You need to include a footnote, include the surname of the author, and within the parenthesis, write the reference number and then write the page number.
Example: Bingham (n 1) 12
This is how you will add citations to your Word document
Conclusion
You have now seen the different types of referencing for different sources like Books, Articles, and so on. Always make sure that your texts are in the same font and the same font size even if it’s a reference from multiple sources. Use academic legal sources rather than using Wikipedia or other sources that can be updated or edited by anyone.
Digi Assignment provides you support and help tips on how to go about using different referencing techniques along with examples for better understanding, which in turn helps to write the best assignment.
