The ''Australian Guide to Legal Citation'' (AGLC) is published by the Melbourne University Law Review Association in collaboration with the ''

Melbourne Journal of International Law The ''Melbourne Journal of International Law'' (MJIL) is a biannual peer-reviewed law review associated with Melbourne Law School which covers all areas of public and private international law. It was established in 2000 and is one of two stu ...

'' and seeks to provide the Australian legal community with a standard for citing legal sources.AGLC
Melbourne University Law Review, Retrieved 3 September 2011.Citation Guides
Melbourne University Law School, Retrieved 3 September 2011. There is no single standard for legal citation in Australia, but the AGLC is the most widely used.Legal citation
, Guide to Legal Research, Library,

University of New South Wales The University of New South Wales (UNSW), also known as UNSW Sydney, is a public research university based in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It is one of the founding members of Group of Eight, a coalition of Australian research-intensiv ...

Retrieved 3 September 2011.

History

By 1998, there existed a large number of competing styles for citing and referencing legal authorities in Australian law publications but one study identified the four major guides:Pearl Rozenberg, "Referencing and Citation of Internet Resources - 'The Truth is out There'", (2000) 1 ''Journal of Information, Law & Technology''
JILT 2000 (1) Pearl Rozenberg
Retrieved 3 September 2011. * Derek French, ''How to Cite Legal Authorities'' (London:

Blackstone Press Blackstone Press Limited is a legal publisher that is a subsidiary of Oxford University Press. It was established in March 1988 by Alistair McQueen. Its management was formerly that of Financial Training Publications, whose law list it purchased ...

, 1996); *

Harvard Law Review The ''Harvard Law Review'' is a law review published by an independent student group at Harvard Law School. According to the ''Journal Citation Reports'', the ''Harvard Law Review''s 2015 impact factor of 4.979 placed the journal first out of 143 ...

Association, ''The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation'' (

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

, MA: HLRA, 1996, 16th ed); * University of Chicago Manual of Legal Citation (Rochester:

Lawyers Cooperative Publishing West (also known by its original name, West Publishing) is a business owned by Thomson Reuters that publishes legal, business, and regulatory information in print, and on electronic services such as Westlaw. Since the late 19th century, West ha ...

, 1989); * McGill Law Review, '' Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation'' (

Montreal Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the second-most populous city in Canada and most populous city in the Canadian province of Quebec. Founded in 1642 as '' Ville-Marie'', or "City of Mary", it is named after Mount Royal, the triple- ...

: Carswell, 1998, 4th ed). There was no major, generally accepted Australian guide and law journals and law schools produced their own style guides.Ross Buckley
"Two Legal Citation Guides"
(Book Review), (1998) 10 (1) Bond Law Review 137, Retrieved 3 September 2011. One of those guides was the ''Melbourne University Law Review Style Guide'' which, in 1997, had reached its third edition. The first edition of the ''Australian Guide to Legal Citation'' ("AGLC1") was published in 1998, a year which saw the publication of three other general guides: *Colin Fong, ''Australian Legal Citation - A Guide'' ("Fong's guide"); *Pearl Rozenberg, ''Australian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation'' (" Law Book Co. guide"); and *Anita Stuhmcke, ''Legal Referencing'' ("

Butterworths LexisNexis is a part of the RELX corporation that sells data analytics products and various databases that are accessed through online portals, including portals for computer-assisted legal research (CALR), newspaper search, and consumer inform ...

guide"). Fong's guide was prepared by Colin Fong, then Research Librarian with Sydney solicitors Allen Allen & Hemsley and now an Adjunct Lecturer at the UNSW Law School. While one reviewer described it as a "remarkably useful and sensible book", another reviewer conducted a comparative review of Fong's guide and AGLC1 and found Fong's guide a "quixotic work". The Law Book Co. guide had a second edition in 2003 and the Butterworths Guide a third edition in 2005.

AGLC1

The AGLC1 contained general rules and examples for legal citation and specific rules for Australian primary law (cases and legislation) and secondary sources (journal articles, books and other materials). Its coverage of international legal materials was limited to Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States and some other basic international sources. It also had two appendices: commonly used abbreviations and a table of law reports. It also featured a concise ''Quick Reference Guide''. It was "comprehensive and easy to use".

AGLC2

The second edition ("AGLC2") in 2002 expanded its rules to include more sources: transcripts (court, television, and radio), explanatory memoranda to legislation, translations, parliamentary committee and royal commissions reports, the constitutional convention debates, speeches, and letters. It also addressed internet sources. It expanded its coverage of basic international sources: decisions of the

European Court of Justice The European Court of Justice (ECJ, french: Cour de Justice européenne), formally just the Court of Justice, is the supreme court of the European Union in matters of European Union law. As a part of the Court of Justice of the European U ...

, the WTO, and GATT. In its general rules, it added a rule on the use of bibliographies. It also revised the AGLC1 rules to make them clearer and increased the number of examples.

AGLC3

The third edition ("AGLC3") in 2010 added 14 chapters and divided the whole into 6 parts. The lists of information in AGLC2 were replaced with tables and all the AGLC2 examples were replaced with new examples and further examples given. The international legal materials (Part IV) were greatly expanded and the foreign jurisdictions (Part V) covered now include China, Hong Kong, France, Germany, Malaysia, Singapore, and South Africa. Some rules were changed: for example, citations of books now require publisher information. AGLC3 is over 300 pages but "much of its length is due to the clear format and useful examples".Dennis Warren and Steven Tudor, "La Trobe Law Short Guide to Citing the Law", (2011, 3rd ed. School of Law, La Trobe University).

AGLC4

The fourth edition ("AGLC4") was released in November 2018, combining secondary source rules into a single chapter on 'General Rules for Citing Secondary Sources'; it allows for cross referencing, and more kinds of materials have rules added, including intellectual property materials, podcasts, online secondary material, forthcoming journal articles, television episodes, social media posts, and journals that don't use a volume format.

Notes

References

External links

* {{Official website, http://www.law.unimelb.edu.au/mulr/aglc
AGLC3 PDF versionAGLC4 PDF version
Australian law journals Legal citation guides