We highly recommend all Newcastle Law School students refer to the full and descriptive OSCOLA guide before addressing their formative and summative coursework.

The full OSCOLA 4th edition (2012) (left) and Quick Reference (right) guides are available from the OSCOLA website.

Due to the older format, the OSCOLA guide is not accessible to some screen readers. This PDF version can be read by the Microsoft Edge screen reader:

The Institute for Advanced Legal Studies Referencing Guide is HTML-based and is also accessible: libguides.ials.sas.ac.uk/referencing 

If you are citing an element of international law (e.g. a Treaty) you will need to consult separate guides:

• OSCOLA 2006: Citing International Law, or:
• The New York University School of Law Guide to Foreign and International Legal Citations.

A handy list of A-Z OSCOLA examples provided by Cardiff University is also available:

If you are citing an element of international law (e.g. a Treaty, UN documents, ICJ publications) you will need to consult separate guides:

• OSCOLA 2006: Citing International Law, or:
• The New York University School of Law Guide to Foreign and International Legal Citations.

If you are citing legal documents from within the United States, we recommend you consult The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation. This is available from the Law Library shelves.

OSCOLA is a guide and offers a consistent method of citing legal materials in your work. It is not definitive. If the material you wish to cite is not included in the OSCOLA rules or guidelines then check the OSCOLA FAQs section on the Oxford University website which is being used to record advice on new or updated resources, pending discussion by the OSCOLA editorial board. Alternatively, use the general principles of the standard to maintain consistency. You will not be penalised for this. If you need to cite international law, please see the tab above. 

Specific examples with Newcastle Law School approval:

• WLUK citations

WLUK are Westlaw's own neutral citations and are not a published case series or law report. As noted in the current Practice Direction you should cite a published series in preference, e.g. The Law Reports, the Weekly Law Reports, the All England Law Reports or a specialist series. You should remember to check BAILII and Lexis+ UK for a neutral citation or published report. If WLUK is the only version of the case available then please note the difference in detail:

Stream v Environment Agency [2019] 4 WLUK 397.

Where:

[2019] is the year the case was heard

4 is the month of the hearing (not the volume)

WLUK is Westlaw United Kingdom

397 is a sequential number given to the case by Westlaw (not a page number)

• A source cited in a secondary source (as noted in OSCOLA FAQs)

If it is not possible to find the original source, cite the source as cited in the secondary source. In brackets, put 'as cited in' then cite the secondary source including the page number.

Quoted in WL Clay, The Prison Chaplain: A Memoir of the Reverend John Clay (London 1861) 554 (as cited in M Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal Culture, Law and Policy in England 1830-1914 (CUP 1990) 70).

• Twitter

Citation of a tweet in a footnote:

Ncl Uni Law Library, ‘And @NorthLawAwards Pro Bono Team of the Year for @NCLLawSchool's Streetlaw programme! Well done everyone!’ (Twitter, 8 June 2018) <https://twitter.com/nclliblaw/status/1005003982224445440> accessed 8 June 2018.

• Westlaw Insight*

*Please note: this is historic unless you are referring to a source in the old Westlaw interface (phased out in 2019).

Jonathan Coad and Lewis Silkin, 'Defamation: Internet Publications' Westlaw Insight (26 November 2013) [1] accessed 7 October 2016.

Insight articles should be cited using the rules for newspapers articles (see OSCOLA's full guide), with Westlaw Insight in place of the newspaper name, no publisher information, the date when you accessed the article (as they do get updated), and paragraph numbers (where necessary) in square brackets.

• ​Citing foreign law and sources in other languages 

OSCOLA  (4th edition, page 8) advises that foreign primary legal sources should be citied as they are in the home jurisdiction, and secondary sources should be cited as OSCOLA advises. However, you may find that these sources are in other languages. You should cite the source in the foreign language, but include an English transliteration (if appropriate) and/or an English translation in your citation. 

EndNote is a useful tool for managing your references, but the OSCOLA_4th_edn and OSCOLA 2 4th edn styles in EndNote do require some manual inputting and amending of references to ensure that footnotes and bibliographies comply with the published guidelines for the OSCOLA referencing style. To find out about how to use EndNote and OSCOLA, please go to the OSCOLA section on the EndNote Library Guide.

Law PORT is a collection of training resources from the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS). These resources have been designed by a team of knowledgeable IALS Librarians to support postgraduate researchers in Public International Law and in the correct use of OSCOLA.

The Cite Them Right Referencing Tutorial includes the OSCOLA referencing style.

This is a comprehensive interactive exercise which reinforces the principles of referencing and use of the OSCOLA style, advised for use in Newcastle Law School. (You are strongly advised to check your work against the original OSCOLA guide.) You do not have to register to take the tutorial, but your progress will not be saved if you explore the exercise without registration.