Volume 8 Issue 2

Electronic Citation Guide for Legal Materials

RUTH BOHILL*

For financial and other reasons new law schools such as that at the University of New England have much of their library resources in electronic form rather than in hard copy. A disadvantage of this approach is that there is no uniformity in the citation of electronic legal materials. Hence, the University of New England Department of Law has developed its own electronic citation guide for the use of students in their assignments.

The paper begins with a discussion of official attempts in the USA and Australia to develop medium neutral style guides for the citation of material both from electronic and paper sources, before discussing the principles on which the University of New England Guide is based. The paper considers how the style guide deals with some of the problems faced by any system of citation of electronic legal materials, including

• the citation of primary and secondary sources including cases, legislation the reports of government agencies and enquiries and parliamentary debates,

• the citation of quotations from documents which do not have fixed page numbers and which may be modified periodically,

• the difference in citation style imposed by the differences in information available for World Wide Web documents and File Transfer Protocol documents

• the citation of messaging services, email messages, CD-Roms and diskettes.