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OSCOLA (4th edition)

Free OSCOLA citation generator

Paste a URL, ISBN or DOI and get an OSCOLA reference in seconds. The Oxford Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities, the footnote style every UK law school requires.

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When you use OSCOLA

OSCOLA is the Oxford Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities, currently in its 4th edition, and it is the citation standard of UK legal writing. Law schools in England, Wales and much of the Commonwealth require it for essays, moots and dissertations, and the main law journals use it too.

It is nothing like APA or Harvard. There are no author-date citations and no parentheses in the text. Everything goes in numbered footnotes, and the punctuation philosophy is minimalism: no full stops after abbreviations, so it is UKSC not U.K.S.C., and no comma before the year in most forms. The style has precise, separate formats for cases, legislation, books, articles and online sources.

A generator helps most with the secondary sources, books, journal articles and websites, which follow regular patterns this tool produces directly. For cases and statutes the safest route is the templates below, because case citations depend on which report series published the judgment and whether it has a neutral citation, which is judgment specific. We also have a full plain-English OSCOLA guide on the blog if the footnote system is new to you.

The formats, with real examples

Paste your source into the tool above and it fills these in for you. If you would rather see the pattern, here is exactly what each one looks like.

Case with a neutral citation
Name v Name [Year] Court Number, [Year] Volume Report Page
EXAMPLER v Jogee [2016] UKSC 8, [2017] AC 387
Legislation
Short Title Year, s section(subsection)
EXAMPLEHuman Rights Act 1998, s 6(1)
Book
Author, Title (Edition, Publisher Year) page
EXAMPLETimothy Endicott, Administrative Law (5th edn, OUP 2021) 143
Journal article
Author, 'Title' (Year) Volume Journal Page
EXAMPLEPaul Craig, 'Judicial Review and Anxious Scrutiny' (2015) 131 LQR 60
Website
Author, 'Title' (Site Name, Date) <URL> accessed Date
EXAMPLEJoshua Rozenberg, 'Who Guards the Guardians?' (A Lawyer Writes, 4 May 2023) <https://rozenberg.substack.com> accessed 14 August 2026

In-text citations

Parenthetical: OSCOLA never cites in the text itself. Every citation is a superscript number pointing to a footnote, placed after the punctuation.
Narrative: The first footnote gives the full citation. Later references use a short form with a cross reference to the original note, like Endicott (n 3) 150.

Quotations under three lines run inside your text in single quotation marks with the footnote after. Longer quotations become an indented block with no quotation marks.

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Mistakes people make in OSCOLA

COMMON SLIP
Putting full stops in abbreviations, like U.K.S.C. or A.C., because it looks more formal.
WHAT TO DO
OSCOLA strips them all. It is UKSC, AC, QB, LQR. The 4th edition removed nearly every full stop from citation abbreviations, and markers spot the old habit instantly.
COMMON SLIP
Italicizing everything, including case report abbreviations and journal names.
WHAT TO DO
In OSCOLA only case names and book titles are italic. Report series, statutes and journal abbreviations stay in roman type: R v Jogee is italic, [2017] AC 387 is not.
COMMON SLIP
Writing ibid or the case name in full every single time a source repeats.
WHAT TO DO
Use the short form plus a cross reference: Endicott (n 3) 150 points back to footnote 3. Ibid is allowed for the note immediately before, but the (n x) form is the workhorse.
COMMON SLIP
Citing a case only by the report, with no neutral citation.
WHAT TO DO
For judgments from 2001 onward, give the neutral citation first, then the best report: R v Jogee [2016] UKSC 8, [2017] AC 387. The neutral citation identifies the judgment itself, independent of any publisher.

Questions students actually ask

What is OSCOLA and who has to use it?
The Oxford Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities, a footnote citation system published by Oxford for legal writing. UK law schools require it for coursework and dissertations, and most UK law journals follow it. If you study law in England or Wales, this is your style for the whole degree.
How do I cite a case in OSCOLA?
Case name in italics, neutral citation, then the law report: R v Jogee [2016] UKSC 8, [2017] AC 387. Older cases without a neutral citation use the report alone with the court in brackets at the end, like Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] AC 562 (HL). Pinpoint a paragraph with square brackets: [2016] UKSC 8 [87].
How do I cite legislation in OSCOLA?
By short title and year, then the provision: Human Rights Act 1998, s 6(1). Sections abbreviate to s, plural ss. In the footnote you rarely need more, and if the act is named in full in your sentence, you may not need a footnote at all, which OSCOLA explicitly allows.
Does OSCOLA use a bibliography?
For essays, usually just the footnotes. Dissertations and theses take tables of cases and legislation plus a bibliography of secondary sources, where author names invert to surname first, like Endicott T. Check your law school's coursework rules, because practice varies for shorter work.
Can this generator handle cases and statutes automatically?
It formats books, articles and websites automatically from an ISBN, DOI or URL. Cases and legislation depend on judgment-specific details like neutral citations and report series, so build those from the templates above and our OSCOLA guide, then keep the footnote numbering consistent.

Keep going

Guide: OSCOLA in plain English →Oxford generator →Harvard generator →
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