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Massey University > OWLL > Referencing > Other referencing styles > Legal citations

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Legal citations

Law and legal courses at Massey University may require you to follow guidelines specific to legal references.

Two common style guides for legal references are the New Zealand Law Style Guide and the Australian Guide to Legal Citation (AGLC). The full style guides are available online, via the following pages:

  • New Zealand Law Style Guide
  • Australian Guide to Legal Citation

This page outlines the basics of legal citation according to the New Zealand Law Style Guide. The full style guide puts these citations in footnotes. If your course is using APA style or MLA style you can put the citations within the text of your assignment instead. See Acts of Parliament in APA style and Acts of Parliament in MLA style.

Legislation

In APA style in-text, acts of parliament are referred to by name and year:

Minimum Wage Act 1983

If you refer to the act again the year does not need to be repeated:

Minimum Wage Act

Acts of parliament are divided into sections, subsections, paragraphs, and subparagraphs. ‘s’ comes before the section number (‘ss’ if you are referring to several sections); all the other divisions go in brackets:

Minimum Wage Act 1983, s 4(1)(b)(ii)

In MLA style in-text, acts of parliament are referred to by name. The act number or year is not included but the page, paragraph or section number being referred to is:

The Resource Management Act (sec. 3) prohibits…

Cases

When citing cases that are well-known or very old, the name of the parties involved is enough:

Westco Lagan Ltd v Attorney-General

Other cases may require a full citation, which includes the year, the volume number of the source, the standard abbreviation for the source (for example, New Zealand Law Reports), the page number and may also include court identifiers (e.g. HC for High Court or CA for Court of Appeal; see section 3.2 of the New Zealand Law Style Guide):

Westco Lagan Ltd v Attorney-General [2001] 1 NZLR 40

Legal journals

Legal journals follow a similar pattern to cases: the year is included first (in round brackets if the journal is sorted by volume, in square brackets otherwise), then the standard abbreviation for the journal, then the page number:

(1998) 18 NZULR 77

The journal should give additional information on citing for that journal.

Parliamentary debates / Hansard

The Hansard record of parliamentary debates includes the following information: debate date, volume number, ‘NZPD’ (which stands for New Zealand Parliamentary Debates), and the page number.

(16 May 2007) 639 NZPD 9284

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Last updated on 18 December, 2019

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