There are many series of law reports published, with The Law Reports from the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting (ICLR) being considered the most authoritative (AC, QB, Ch, Fam). Lawyers in Court would cite a report from this series in preference to any other, but in academia where several
versions of the same report may be available, you should cite the report that you have read.
The next best reports are The Weekly Law Reports (WLR) or the All England Law Reports (All ER). These are known as general series of law reports, if a judgment is not available from any of these sources, then cite a specialist series such as the Criminal Appeal Reports, Industrial Cases Reports etc.
In case citation there are either square or round brackets around the year. [] indicates the year the case was reported and that you need to know the year in order to find the case in print. () indicates the year is not necessary to find the correct volume and that you use the volume number to find the case report within the series.
There are two types of case citation, ‘traditional’, which includes details of a printed volume number, and page number and ‘neutral’, which began in 2001 when the Court of Appeal and later all divisions of the High Court adopted a form of citation which includes details of the case number and the Court. There are no references to printed volumes or pages in neutral citation; it is format and publisher neutral, and was introduced to enable easier location of unreported cases or transcripts from websites such as BAILLI.
Reference order:
Party names | [year] OR (year) | volume | report abbreviation | first page or case number | (abbreviated Court name)
First citation in footnote:
Subsequent citations in a footnote
If you refer to a source more than once in your footnotes and wish to specify a particular page use a pinpoint as follows, for
example, ‘ibid 150’means‘in the same work, but this time at page 150’.
When pinpointing within a case, give paragraph numbers in square brackets at the end of the citation. If the judgment has no paragraph numbers, give the page number pinpoint after the Court.
If citing a particular judge:
For cases which have a neutral case citation, where you have both the neutral citation and the traditional citation, give the neutral citation first followed by a comma and then the citation for the most authoritative report.
Party names | [year] | Court | case number, | [year] OR (year) | volume | report abbreviation | first page
If a case is unreported i.e. not published in a printed law report, cite the neutral citation if available. If this is not available, cite as follows.
Party names | (Court, date of the judgment)
Cases heard prior to 1865 were published in a variety of report series named after the individual law reporter, otherwise known as the ‘nominate reports’. These cases are available both in print in the library in CAT.5 and in Lexis and Westlaw in the reprinted form of the ‘English Reports’.
Party names | (year) | volume |nominate report abbreviation | first page, |volume | English Report abbreviation | first page
If there is a pinpoint use a semi-colon after the page number to separate the citation for the nominate report and English Report.
R v Smith becomes Smith (in a criminal law essay, but in an essay on another area list by full name under ‘R’, also do this for judicial review cases with the Crown as the first-named party.)
Case citations appear as in the footnote but note that case names are not italicised in a table of cases and should appear in alphabetical order of the first significant word.
Note: no full stops or pinpoints are included for any source in a Table.