This blog covers how to cite legislation and cases from all of the jurisdictions that we have not already covered. As a reminder, we have already looked at:
- OSCOLA Referencing Summary for Legislation from Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland
- OSCOLA Referencing Summary for Cases from Scotland and the Scottish Court Structure
- OSCOLA Referencing Summary for Cases from Northern Ireland and the Court Structure
- OSCOLA Referencing Summary for EU Legislation
- OSCOLA Referencing Summary for EU Judgments from the CJEU
- OSCOLA Referencing Summary for Cases from the European Court of Human Rights
And from closer to home:
- OSCOLA Referencing Summary for Legislation (for legislation from the UK)
- OSCOLA Referencing Summary for Cases from England and Wales
- OSCOLA Referencing for Cases – Law Report Hierarchy and Subsequent Citations
All of these are links, so feel free to click through on the relevant title!
However, there are still a lot of jurisdictions that are not covered by any of these, but you might still need to reference legislation or cases from them. For example, if you need to compare law between two or more jurisdictions, it is important that you can correctly reference all of the legislation and cases you are referring to, not just ones from the jurisdictions covered above.
Remember to make it clear in the text which jurisdiction the legislation or case you have mentioned comes from. You could do this by placing the jurisdiction in brackets after the case or legislation, which is a quick and simple way to improve the clarity of your writing.
Alternatively, you may wish to introduce the legislation or case by mentioning in the text which jurisdiction it is from, such as “the Australian case of”. This will also be sufficient to let the reader know what you are referring to and, with the citation, where they can find more information.
Legislation from Other Jurisdictions
Firstly, we will be looking at how to reference legislation from other jurisdictions, for which we will use the example of New Zealand’s Accident Compensation Act 1972. As you can already see, legislation from other jurisdictions is written in text in much the same way as UK legislation is: plain text, with the year after it.
You can also abbreviate legislation in much the same way as you would for the UK, so our example could probably be abbreviated to ACA 1972. If you are going to be using an abbreviation, remember to put it in brackets after the first mention of the full name in text.
The correct way to reference legislation from another jurisdiction is actually pretty simple; you reference it in the correct way as for its own jurisdiction, giving the jurisdiction in round brackets after the reference if necessary. If we use this method for our example above, we would write:
Accident Compensation Act 1972 (NZ).
As you can see, I have put “(NZ)” after the act title and year to show that this act is from the jurisdiction of New Zealand. You may not need to do this if the act itself makes it obvious which jurisdiction it’s from.
Section 4.3 of the appendix in the OSCOLA 4th edition guide gives guides for citations. For example, for New Zealand, you should use:
Geoff McLay, Christopher Murray and Jonathan Orpin, New Zealand Law Style Guide (Thomson Reuters 2009).
These guides give you an idea of what the correct referencing for the jurisdiction should look like.
However, even though you should use the jurisdiction’s system of referencing, remember that OSCOLA is light on punctuation, so you should remove any full stops in abbreviations.
In the bibliography, create a separate list for each jurisdiction.
Cases from Other Jurisdictions
For cases, we will be using the example of the Australian case Waltons Stores (Interstate) Ltd v Maher (1988). As you can see, case names from other jurisdictions are given in italics, as they are for the jurisdictions we have looked at before. Similarly, the year is given in round brackets in the same way as for all jurisdictions.
As with other cases, you can shorten the case name if necessary to a simpler and more commonly used one. More information on this can be found in my blog OSCOLA Referencing for Cases – Law Report Hierarchy and Subsequent Citations.
As with legislation, cite cases from other jurisdictions in the same way as they are in their own jurisdiction. So, with our example, we would use the citation:
Waltons Stores (Interstate) Ltd v Maher (1988) 164 CLR 387.
We refer again to section 4.3 of the appendix of the OSCOLA 4th edition guide to find the correct guide for Australian cases:
Australian Guide to Legal Citation (3rd edn, Melbourne University Law Review Association 2010) <https://law.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/1586203/FinalOnlinePDF-2012Reprint.pdf> accessed 12 May 2018.
Again, the only change you should make is to use minimal punctuation in these citations.
You also need to identify which court the case was heard in. The law report series used in your citation may well do this itself, as in our example above, but if not, you will need to give the court in brackets after the end of the citation. You can write the court name in full or as an abbreviated version.
If you are citing a case from the highest court of a US state, simply the state abbreviation is sufficient instead of the full court name.
Wrapping Up
This is quite a short blog, but that’s because cases and legislation from other jurisdictions are relatively easy to deal with – just make sure you use the jurisdiction’s own system of referencing and take out all unnecessary punctuation. If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments below and don’t forget to take a look at the OSCOLA 4th edition guide, which has more information on this area.
Photo above by Duangphorn Wiriya on Unsplash.
Want help proofreading your work? Contact Carmine Proofreading for a friendly, professional service from a qualified proofreader.
Email: CarmineProofreading@gmail.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CarmineProofed
Carmine Proofreading 
1 thought on “OSCOLA Referencing Summary for Legislation and Cases from Other Jurisdictions”