In this blog post, we will be looking at how to reference books of authority and institutional works using the OSCOLA referencing system. These are both valuable sources that you can use in legal writing and you may well need to for a lot of older cases and pieces of legislation, so it is well worth learning the correct format for citing one of them.
We will start by asking what books of authority and institutional works are, then considering their value as a source and why you would use them in your work. We will also look at some examples of each, then move on to how to reference them. As always, if you are already confident about the background of this topic, feel free to jump ahead to the section on referencing.
What are Books of Authority and Institutional Works?
Books of authority and institutional works are very similar sources; indeed, the only difference is the country to which they refer. Books of authority concern England and are from around the late 12th century to the mid-18th century, whereas institutional works concern Scotland.
In essence, both types of source are books which were written at the time of the cases and laws and are widely established as reliable. They can, therefore, be taken as a formal source of law and are thought of as accurate statements of the law of their time. This is where the name “books of authority” comes from – they are generally considered by most to be authoritative and can be used in your legal writing as a strong, reliable source.
In addition, these books of authority are so commonly used as a source that they have their own abbreviations (and style of referencing) which should be used in footnote references. The same goes for institutional works – they have their own abbreviations to use in footnote references. You can find a list of some of these books and their abbreviations at section 4.2.3 of the appendix of the OSCOLA Referencing Guide (4th Edn), which can be viewed here.
Should You Use Them as a Reference?
Both books of authority and institutional works can be an excellent source to use in your work, for the reasons outlined above. However, there are still a number of points that you should consider before citing them, in the same way as you would for any source. This is part of checking your sources for reliability before using them as a reference in your work.
As explained above, books of authority are usually seen as reliable in legal writing and are considered authoritative in their areas, so this should probably not be much of an issue. Take care to double check where you got a particular piece of information from, so you can accurately cite it and readers can find the exact part you are using without any trouble.
In addition, make sure that the source you are using is actually considered to be a book of authority or institutional work! Books of authority include Blackstone, Glanvill and Hale and institutional works include Bankton and Stair.
Nevertheless, you still need to consider at least some of the usual checks for source reliability when you are referencing books of authority and institutional works. The first of these is very specific to your work, as it concerns the relevance of the source. Essentially, this means deciding whether the book of authority or institutional work is closely related to what you are writing.
For example, you may be writing about a specific case from legal history. While you will almost certainly be including at least some other cases from history and possibly more modern ones, take care that you are not going into as much depth about these as you are about the main case. A source is no good if it is not really relevant to what you are writing!
A similar point to this is to think about how current your source is. If you are citing a book of authority or institutional work, there is a good chance they won’t be particular recent! Again, this is not necessarily a bad thing – if you are looking at law from a historical perspective, you would expect to be using sources from the time to aid accuracy. However, if a source significantly predates the topic you are discussing, it is probably not that relevant.
How Do You Reference Books of Authority and Institutional Works?
The basic format for books of authority is to put the abbreviation of the work first, followed by the first page number of the part you are referring to.
Abbreviation | Page number
For example, a section beginning on page 264 of the 3rd book of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Law of England would be cited as:
3 Bl Comm 264.
You can find the abbreviations used for various books of authority in Appendix 4.2.3 of the OSCOLA Referencing Guide.
A similar system is used for institutional works:
Bankton Institute II, 3, 98.
Wrapping Up
I hope that you now feel more confident about referencing books of authority and institutional works, as they can be very strong sources for your writing, especially if you are looking at things in a historical context. Next time we will be looking at how to reference encyclopaedias, so do stop by in two weeks for that!
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