Free guide to citing legal material, compiled by volunteers from Canadian universities and hosted on the CanLII website. The main focus is on Canadian cases, legislation, secondary sources and government publications, but there is also some information about foreign and international sources. The guide is in English, but a French version is planned.
The Indigo Book is an open-access legal citation manual that uses the same citation system as the well-known Bluebook. It is an open access resource, provided by a team of students from New York University led by Professor Christopher Jon Sprigman; it was last updated in 2016.
Website of the Project for Interdisciplinary Law and Religion Studies (PILARS) an initiative of the Open University Law School. The project provides comment and analysis on recent law and religion judgements along with a list of related judgements covering a range of jurisdictions. PILARS also offers guidance on how to write a case comment, a bibliography of law and religion texts and a list of related websites.
Law PORT is a collection of online, interactive training resources, aimed at postgraduate legal researchers, and made freely available by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS). The tutorials are designed to develop legal research and information literacy skills and focus on public international law. Tutorials currently available include an Introduction to OSCOLA (Oxford University Standard for the Citation of Legal Authorities) and an overview of the key sources for researching Customary International Law.
Extensive list of abbreviations for law reports, law journals, courts, government departments, international organisations and so on, provided by Monash University Library, Australia. Covers Australia and other common law jurisdictions and public international law; also has key abbreviations from civil law jurisdictions.
Online guide to the writing and publishing of United States case law. The guide was written by Ken Strutin, who is Director of Legal Information Services at the New York State Defenders Association, and was published in August 2014 on LLRX.com. The guide provides commentary on and links to articles from law review, books, guides and reports on the publishing of case law. There are also links to manuals on opinion writing. Not all of the materials linked to are available in full text.
This website makes available a citation system for Irish law, called OSCOLA Ireland. Released in August 2011, it was developed by Irish academics and is based on the Oxford Standard for the Citation of Legal Authorities (OSCOLA). OSCOLA Ireland may be downloaded from the website as a pdf file. It covers abbreviations, cases, legislation, books, articles, online sources and other materials. It also gives guidance on presentation, punctuation and cross-referencing. The site provides a quick reference guide and FAQs.
The website of Bibliothèque Cujas in Paris includes a suite of legal research resources called 'Cujasthèque'. The Jurisguide section gives an overview of French legal publications and provides introductions to many different aspects of French legal research, some intended for students, some for academics. Full research guides are provided under ‘Guides et tutoriels’, covering legislation, case law, doctrinal writing, journals, mélanges and parliamentary publications; their main focus is on French law, but other countries, the EU, the Council of Europe and the UN are also included.
The UK Parliamentary Counsel Office (PCO) is a team of lawyers based in Whitehall, London, who draft Government Bills for introduction into Parliament (except those relating only to Scotland). The site publishes an overview of the stages in the drafting of a bill and its passage through Parliament. A history of the PCO is presented, and other features of the site include an essay on legislative drafting by Geoffrey Bowman, and a set of links to parliamentary and government websites.
A guide to legal writing, from the Office of the Federal Register, US National Archives and Records Administration. The guide is a sequence of linked topics on the basics of writing regulatory documents which include arrangement, headings, definitions, ambiguity, principles of clear writing and grammar. In addition, the site presents some links to plain language resources and a PDF copy of the Federal Register Document Drafting Handbook 1998 with amendments.
