Parentheses in traditional quotations| Common Law Report Abbreviations | How do I know what a legal abbreviation means? Citations, including neutral citations and report citations: Provide the neutral citation first, followed by a quote from the best report, separated by a comma. Around 2001, courts began assigning “neutral citations” to cases. Neutral citations make it easier for people to find cases online. Each neutral citation includes: Neutral citations can be used to identify a case and find a transcript (or subsequent report) using online services such as Westlaw, Lexis®Library or BAILII. This neutral citation will be useful when creating your reference (see the section below entitled “British cases with neutral citations”). Parentheses ( ) are used around the year in a legal citation if the series has consecutive volume numbers and the year is not essential to the search for the case. For example, to find the report cited as (1983) 77 Cr App R 76, you do not need the date because the volume number – 77 – indicates where to find the report. Most of the Bodleian Law Library`s British paper collection is located on the ground floor of the library. Legal reports are at Cw UK 100 and reviews at Cw UK 300.
British legal monographs are catalogued with different class characters, making it easy to search, this section starts at K to KZ before the main series of legal reports and journals. The legislation on paper can be found on floor 1. See also the Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations (www.legalabbrevs.cardiff.ac.uk), which has a very useful search engine for searching series titles by abbreviations (and vice versa). For more information about abbreviations in neutral quotation marks, see bailii. Library of Legal Classics. Complete text of more than 100 legal texts, including Blackstone`s Commentaries (1803), Cardozo`s Growth of the Law (1924), and the first edition of Story`s Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1833). The provincial laws of Canada include the provincial laws of ten of the Canadian provinces. Contains public and private laws passed by Canadian provincial governments. Up-to-date, revised and historical content is now available for Alberta, British Columbia, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Ontario. Historical and revised content is only available for Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, Quebec and Saskatchewan. N.b. These are examples of quotes that you can see.
For instructions on citing sources in your own work, consult a style guide, for example: Contemporary cases have three main elements: the names of the parties (italics), the neutral citation, and the judgment report. In the case of judgments prior to the introduction of neutral quotations, the names of the parties (in italics), the record of the judgment and the abbreviation of the Court of First Instance must appear in parentheses. When quoting or paraphrasing a judgment, you must also specify an exact point. A neutral quote characterizes a judgment; It is perhaps most easily understood as a judgment figure, even if it looks like a quote for a legislative report. The term “neutral” is used to indicate that it is independent of a published report (“media neutral”). Neutral citations were first published by the House of Lords, the Privy Council, the Court of Appeal and the Administrative Court in 2001 and by all other divisions of the High Court in 2002. Courts and commissions also issue neutral citations. You will notice that case citations use different parentheses or no parentheses throughout the year. The use of parentheses varies depending on whether the report is Scottish or English and whether the year is absolutely necessary to find the case in the printed volumes. There are a number of important legal databases covering UK law. Below is a list of the most important databases or in the Legal Databases tab for more information and links to online tutorials.
Square brackets [ ] are used when the series has no consecutive band numbers and the year is critical in determining the correct volume. The story of Donoghue v. Stevenson therefore appears in the 1932 volume of appeal cases, beginning at page 562, written [1932] AC 562. Neutral citations also use square brackets for the year. This guide is intended for students and researchers studying British law and legal systems at Oxford University, although students and researchers from all fields may find it useful. Below are books on legal research. Books and resources on the English and Welsh legal systems are available in the Legal System tab. Since a single judgment may be reproduced in more than one series of reports, there may be multiple citations for the same case. For example, the above case was also reported to Cadder v HM Advocate 2010 SLT 1125. Neutral quotations indicate the year of the judgment in square brackets, the court code and the judgment number. The neutral quotations from the High Court contain the division in parentheses after the judgment number.
The following are examples of neutral quotes. Neutral quotes can be found by checking the case in one of the major commercial databases or on BAILII. Brackets and parentheses are used equally in legal journal citations. There is no database containing all UK legal material, but the 2 main databases are Westlaw Edge UK and LexisLibrary members OR can access both via their Oxford single sign-on details. For more information on this and a list of other useful electronic resources (including free resources), see the Database section in the left column or tab above for specific types of material. More recently, a system of “neutral citations” has been developed, as transcripts of judgments are now quickly available online and lawyers must refer cases that have not yet been reported. These do not refer to a case report, but to the judgment itself. A neutral citation gives the name of the case, the court seised, the year of the judgment and the file number: only cases from 2001 onwards are cited in a neutral manner. A pinpoint is a reference to a specific paragraph or page number.
All judgments with neutral quotes have numbered paragraphs. If you are quoting a judgment, indicate the paragraphs quoted in square brackets at the end of the quotation, as shown in the [45] bracketed at the end of the quotation in R v G (below).
