OSCOLA: The Oxford University Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities

OSCOLA: The Oxford University Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities, 4th ed, by Donal and Sandra Meredith, eds, Oxford: Hart, 2012, 60 pages (wire-bound).There are two golden rules for the citation of legal authorities. One is consistency. The other is consideration for the reader.'With the publication of the fourth edition of OSCOLA (the first being in 2000), the Oscolites, if I may adopt such a term,2 have issued an implicit challenge to other contenders in the world of legal citation. I suggest that the challenge has four prongs. The first aims at what may be called the hegemony of uniformity.3 The second, at a tendency to what Judge Posner has declaimed as hypertrophy4 in the size of legal citation manuals. The third, at barriers to accessing such manuals. And the fourth prong, gentler and more tentative than the other three, at the notion that footnoting and referencing legal materials is purely a question of function, with little role for beauty, elegance, or style-such considerations being reserved, if at all, for the main body of legal texts in which the citations appear. These prongs are intertwined, but I will outline and address them separately below.Unlike the McGill Guide5 or the Bluebook,6 OSCOLA doesn't the word in its title. Nor does it purport to be the U.K.'s definitive style as the Bluebook does for the U.S.7 It does not even assert, as the McGill Guide does, that it is essential to have a system of rules in order to perform efficient legal research.8 Rather, OSCOLA provides guidelines...based on common practice in UK legal citation, but with a minimum of punctuation.9 When citing materials not covered by OSCOLA, the suggestion is to use the general principles in OSCOLA as a guide, and try to maintain consistency.10At first reading, I found this perplexing, even a bit unsettling. Wouldn't a system of legal citation be a good thing, much like having a common global measurement system or harmonized tariffs? Well, yes and no. Certainly, uniformity is a laudable goal. If nothing else, it promotes efficiency, reduces the potential for misunderstanding or mistakes, and permits more seamless transitions. It is reassuring to know that any vehicle I might drive will likely have a speedometer and gauges showing fuel level, oil pressure, and so on. I might even find it reassuring to know that I can expect to find these gauges in roughly the same place on any vehicle's dashboard. But do they need to be the same size and design on different vehicles or the same font for the numeric markings? To ask the question is to answer it, and to distinguish uniformity from consistency. As Posner explains, the dictates of one are not exactly the dictates of the other:Within the same document, uniformity is desirable because without it readers will puzzle over whether the differences are accidents or have some intended significance. But across documents, differences in citation are untroublesome, though slight is an important qualification: differences large enough to make the reader pause to translate from a more familiar to a less familiar form impede easy reading. The basic legal citation convention of placing volume number before the name of a statute, case, or article and page number directly after is uniform, and likewise the abbreviations of [various reporters].11With some modification, Posner's comments provide a practical guide and accord with OSCOLA's dual manifesto of consistency and consideration. So, for example, law review editors might consider it deservedly uniform to have consistency of citation style across articles within the review as a whole. Likewise for court reporters, though Posner notes that the Federal Reporter makes no such stipulation.12 But even then, complete uniformity is bound to be an elusive and futile goal: several Canadian law journals, for example, publish articles in both English and French and there is no suggestion that the different practices for capitalizing the titles of the articles be made uniform. …

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