Legal Author Guidance

If you're following a law study program, you must cite sources according to the Legal Author Guidance. Many other programs follow the APA style for citations, but law study programs follow this guideline. The Legal Author Guide ensures that everyone in the legal field refers to sources in a consistent and readable way. Here are the main rules for this referencing style.

This article is based on the Guide for Legal Authors from 2019. This is the most recent edition of the guide. The basic principle here is that you refer to sources in two ways in your thesis or essay:

1. You put abbreviated references to the literature you cite in footnotes.

2. You also include the full source reference in the bibliography at the end.

By following these guidelines for citing your source, you prevent (unintentional) plagiarism. By the way, it is important to always check the guidelines that your programme follows for the Guidelines for legal authors. They are always the ones to prioritize.

Do you plan to read the guide yourself? Be prepared: it is a thick book. In the summary, you will find most of the information, so that is especially important to read. Doing so will save you a lot of time.

Do you want to automatically have the right citation for your sources in this style? Then use our free generator for the Legal Authors' Guide. After entering a few details, you will immediately see the correct citation for each source. Convenient, right?!

To keep the text easy to read, the Legal Author Guidelines uses footnotes. In the running text, you add a footnote number (for example 1) to the information that you have derived from a source. Try to put footnotes after the end of the sentence as best you can, and not in the middle of the sentence. The abbreviated reference to the source appears at the bottom of the page, in the footnote.

The form of reference in the footnote varies depending on the type of source. For example, a reference to a book looks different than a reference to a journal article. Use the following notations for the footnotes.

Scientific article

Author names, Name of journal year/first-page number.

So:

Dijkgraaf, Ursel & Franken, Journal of Psychology 2022/176.

Publication in a book

Names of authors publication year, p. first page number

So:

Sanders & Warmoed 2019, p. 133.

Publication on a website

'Title online publication', shortened URL.

So:

'Guideline for legal authors: the most important guidelines', athenacheck.nl/leidraad-voor-juridische-auteurs.

Note: you should always keep the website link as short as possible. So leave out irrelevant bits (such as 'www.'). If the URL doesn't fit on the line after the title entry, put it in its entirety on the next line.

Laws and regulations

References to laws and regulations or parliamentary documents should also be put in a footnote and the bibliography. A reference in the footnote will look like this:

Regulation:

Stb. 2021, 12.

Parliamentary Papers:

Parliamentary Papers II 2019/20, 35336, no. 3, p. 28.

Please note: this notation of parliamentary documents is the only correct one according to the Guidelines for legal authors. The government sometimes uses a different way of referencing in its pieces. Even then, continue to follow the referral method from the Guide.

Reference to case law

When you refer to case law, you should include a more extensive reference. This is also because you do not always include these types of sources in the bibliography. For some educational institutions, there are exceptions to this; it is sometimes necessary to make a separate bibliography with case law. So check carefully how this applies to your training.

A reference to case law looks like this:

Abbreviation of authority Date, ECLI.

For example:

Rb. Rotterdam November 17, 2017, ECLI:NL:RBROT:2017:10942.

Want to see more examples?

To get a better idea of ​​what the references look like, check out our Legal Author Guide.

We can give you a helping hand with the correct citation via our Legal Author Guide Generator. Would you like to have your thesis checked for language, spelling errors, and structure? Smart idea! Leave it up to the editors of AthenaCheck to filter out your errors. We are happy to check your thesis for language, structure and common thread.