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Harvard Referencing Guide (not including LHS): Legal referencing

Law Referencing (Oxford - OSCOLA)

Students within the Faculty of Law must use the Oxford Style for Citation of Legal Authorities (OSCOLA). This means that you must use footnotes instead of references at the end of piece of work.

However, some lecturers may also ask you to submit a bibliography at the end of your work. If this is the case, this  should be in author/date order and normally separates books, journals, cases and legislation into separate sections. Check with your lecturer for exact details.

RefWorks and Legal Referencing

RefWorks is a web-based bibliographic management system which allows you to collect, organise and store references from a variety of sources such as books, journal articles and websites. It can then help you to produce bibliographies, reference lists and in-text citations in a range of referencing styles. Classes to show you how to make the best use of RefWorks are held in all campus libraries regularly during semester.  There are also short training videos available to help you get started.

At the moment, Refworks is less useful for Law students because of the need to use OSCOLA / footnotes. However it can be used to produce a list of references for the bibliography at the end of a piece of work. Nevertheless, you will probably have to edit this list to make it comply with correct OSCOLA referencing. 
Despite this limitation, it can still be a valuable tool to record  and organise references exported from Westlaw, Lexis, HeinOnline (and other sources) even if the automated production of the reference list (footnotes) is more problematic.

Legal referencing in Harvard

While we recommend that any legal sources are cited using OSCOLA,  you may be permitted to continue to use the Harvard Style, rather than OSCOLA referencing style. Pear and Shields (below) gives some useful pointers for referencing legal materials in the Harvard Style.