General style notes

Before selecting a referencing style check with your tutor, lecturer or supervisor for the style preferred by the School or Department.

Introduction to the style

The following style notes provide a brief introduction to the Australian Guide to Legal Citation, 4th Edition (AGLC 4). AGLC is commonly used as the legal citation standard in Australia.

AGLC 4 is a footnote referencing system.

AGLC 4 is divided into five parts:

• Part 1: General rules (covering topics such as how to deal with subsequent references (rule 1.4) quotations (rule 1.5), and punctuation (rule 1.6)
• Part 2: Domestic sources (cases in chapter 2, legislation in chapter 3)
• Part 3: Secondary sources (such as general rules for citing secondary sources in chapter 4 and discussed below, journal articles in chapter 5, books in chapter 6, and more).
• Part 4: International materials
• Part 5: Foreign domestic materials (citing the laws of selected countries other than Australia)

The AGLC does not have a rule for every type of material, or rules for every foreign jurisdiction. If you need to cite a source that isn’t covered, you may need to adapt an existing rule or use your best judgment to provide a reference that helps your reader locate the source.

Access to the full style manual

This guide is based on the Australian Guide to Legal Citation, 4th Edition by Melbourne University Law Review Association and Melbourne Journal of International Law.

The full style manual is available as a free digital PDF copy. Print copies are available from the University of Melbourne library. Consult the official manual for more information.

General rules

Interim guidance from the editors of the Melbourne University of Law Review is to treat references from Artificial Intelligence software (including ChatGPT) as Written Correspondence, broadly following rule 7.12 of AGLC.

Pay close attention to the general rules in part 1 and the general rules for citing secondary sources at the start of part 4. Many of the general rules found in these parts are cross-referenced in rules for citing specific sources. For example, the general rules for citing secondary sources in chapter 4 cover:

• rules about citing authors’ and editors’ names including how to deal with post-nominals and honorific titles;
  how to cite multiple authors;
• publications authored by a body such as a government department or non-governmental organisation;
• citing judicial officers and former judicial officers, citing judges written judgments (curially), and citing judges writing in publications such as law reviews (extra-curially)
• how to cite titles, including punctuation, capitalisation, subtitles and italicisation, and rules for short titles;
• the inclusion of URLs and archived URLs using permalink

Subsequent references

Refer to rules 1.4 to 1.4.4 for details.

• Use Ibid when referring to the same source as the immediately preceding footnote. You can add a new pinpoint reference if you’re not citing the exact same page or paragraph as the footnote above.
• When citing a reference that has been used earlier in the document, use a shortened form of the source along with the footnote number where it first appeared.
• For cases and legislation, use a short title. You must add this short title to the end of your original reference.
• For most secondary sources, use the author’s surname. When this isn’t suitable, either because you are citing many works from the same author, or the work was written by a body or group, you can create a short title.

Example

[1] Bruce Oswald, 'The Force Intervention Brigade and UN Peace Operations: Some Legal Issues' in Jeremy Farrall and Hilary Charlesworth (eds), Strengthening the Rule of Law Through the UN Security Council (Routledge, 2016) 239, 248.
[2] Ibid 250.
[3] Michelle Foster, International Refugee Law and Socio-Economic Rights: Refuge from Deprivation (Cambridge University Press, 2007) 56.
[4] Oswald (n 1) 252.

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Pinpoints

A reference to a specific part of a source is called a pinpoint. These should be included in footnotes, but removed from references in your bibliography.

Refer to Rule 1.5 for further guidance on quotations.

• Short quotations (3 lines or fewer) should be incorporated into the text using single quotation marks.
• Long quotations (4 lines or more) should be indented from the left margin in a smaller font size and without quotation marks.
• No special punctuation is required to introduce quotations, whether short or long.

Examples

She observed that ‘the threshold for determining that an international organisation has “effective control” over an operation ought to be high’.¹

The facts were stated as follows:
_{In 1988 the Remuneration Tribunal, under the Remuneration Tribunal Act 1973 (Cth), determined an annual postal allowance of $9,000 for MHRs ... In Brown v West the plaintiff ... [the] shadow Attorney-General, brought an action to challenge the decision of the Minister for Administrative Services ... to increase this entitlement ... to $30,525.²}