How to reference your essays for law

A common problem for law students – as indeed, all students – is how to reference your work to avoid plagiarism. I’ll attempt to answer that here using appropriate examples. You can download the Open University’s Law School Undergraduate Assessment Guide here. Section 6 deals with referencing.

As an OU Law student, you will need to refer to two categories of material:

• general academic sources, such as:
  • module materials (printed or online)
  • books (printed or online)
  • encyclopaedias and dictionaries (printed or online)
  • databases
  • journal articles (printed or online)
  • websites
  • newspaper articles (printed or online)
  • audio-visual materials (original source or online)

and

• primary sources of law:
  • UK cases
  • UK statutes
  • UK secondary legislation
  • EU cases and legislation
  • the European Convention on Human Rights
  • cases from the European Court of Human Rights
  • international sources of law.

A reference to either category of material consists of two components: a citation and a full reference. A citation appears in the main body of your work, and a full reference appears in the reference list at the end of your work.

© The Open University

Online Sources:

For an online source, such as the OU module, the citation would be the author’s name, year of publication and the section or subsection you found the information you are using. So, for this example, the citation would be (The Open University, 2015a, s6.2.1). You can use a lower-case  ‘s’ for ‘section(s)' and a lowercase ‘ss’ for subsection(s). 

In my example, you will see the lowercase ‘a’ after the year – this refers to the first unit you are taking your information from. So, for example your first unit is Unit 4, then every time you refer to Unit 4 (and ONLY Unit 4), you will ALWAYS use the suffix ‘a’ after the year (which is the year you start your course). So, if I refer to Unit 4 nine times, it will always be ‘2015a’. Another unit, for example, Unit 6 in the same assignment, will be ‘2015b’ in every instance you refer to Unit 6… and so forth. Got it?

The full online reference at the end of your assignment/TMA/essay will be composed of the authors' names, the year begun, the Module’s name, where found and when accessed:

The Open University (2015a) Open University Law School Undergraduate Assessment Guide  [Online]. Available at www.learn2.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=884473 (Accessed 16 November 2016).

Text Books:

The format for text books follow a similar ‘code’. The authors’ names first (surname, first initial), the publication date, the name of the text, edition number, where published and the publisher’s name:

Furmston, M., (2012) ‘Cheshire, Fifoot and Furmson’s Law of Contract’, 16^th Edn., Oxford, Oxford University Press.

The in-text citation will be the authors’ name, initial, year published and page number(s) – ‘p’ if one page, ‘pp’ for multiple pages:

(Furmston, M., 2012, pp123-130)

If you are using a quote from a secondary source that is used in the online material or a text book, then you must reference it in-text:

(Furmston, 2012, p. 206 cited in Open University, 2015a)

For a journal article, you follow the same format:

Gibson, K (2014) ‘What lies ahead?’, New Law Journal, vol. 164, no. 7623, p. 12. Available at http://www.newlawjournal.co.uk/nlj/content/what-lies-ahead-0 Accessed on 26.03.2016

The in-text citation would be:

(Gibson, K., 2014)

Case law:

For case law, you MUST give the full reference in the FIRST instance (London and North Eastern Railway v Berriman [1946] AC 278), thereafter you may refer to it by a short name (Berriman). The full case name also must be in your end of assignment reference list.

Full reference list:

At the end of your assignment, you need to give a full reference list in alphabetical order. You may use the words ‘References’ or ‘Reference List’ to head these. You may also list your statutes, and cases in separate but appropriately named lists eg, ‘Cases’, ‘Statutes’.

All the above except for the references at the end of your essay/assignment/TMA are included in the word count.

How to write a law essay:

You can find out more on how to write a law essay from the link.