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Law: Legal Referencing & Citation Tools

This is a brief guide to sources of information for Law available at the AUT Library

Legal Referencing

This guide is for AUT students using the New Zealand Law Style guide (NZLSG) to cite legal material.

The NZLSG is used mainly by Law students. Students in other areas may also need to use the NZLSG for some legal items while APA and Chicago Turabian are the more common citation styles used at AUT.

Juris-M is reference management software which can be used with the NZLSG. See below for installation instructions and guides.

Quick Links for Legal Writing and Citing

Law Citations and Abbreviations

Citations are short references to cases, articles, statutes etc.

The two fundamental parts to a citation are style and abbreviation.

For Style:

  • New Zealand Law Style Guide (NZLSG) to find the style rules.

For Abbreviations:

  • Cardiff Index to legal Abbreviations to create or discover the legal abbreviations. This covers abbreviations from many jurisdictions and can be searched  by full title or abbreviation.
  • Legal Citation of Aotearoa New Zealand (LCANZ) to create or discover abbreviations for NZ material. Search by title or abbreviation.

New Zealand Law Style Guide (NZLSG) - Rules and Guides

The AUT School of Law supports the use of the NZLSG. It was first introduced in 2009 and currently using the third edition. The third edition was published in 2018 and is now available online (see link below), but print copies can be purchased from the bookshop or accessed from the Library.

New Zealand Law Style Guide - print

New Zealand Law Style Guide - online

New Zealand Law Style Guide Apps 3rd ed. available

AUT Library NZLSG User Guides - 3rd edition only

Juris-M / Zotero

What is Juris-M / Zotero

Juris-M and Zotero are free reference management programmes. Juris-M is a variant of Zotero and is designed for legal scholars to use. Juris-M manages law related materials much better than Zotero. Law students who wish to use Juris-M can follow the guides below for installation, to use Juris-M together with Zotero to create collections of legal references to produce footnotes and bibliographies.

Zotero: A Manual for Electronic Referencing by Julia Caldwell and John Prebble

This manual was developed to assist NZLSG users entering legal content into Zotero, before it was replaced by the Juris-M variant.

Access this guide from www.ssrn.com The content most needed is from Section 3 onwards and includes information on entering data for various legal materials.

Guides to Install and Use Juris-M

Zotero

Zotero can be used for non-law referencing styles. To install and use Zotero refer to the guide and also the website for information and support.