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OSCOLA Format Guide

Follow these OSCOLA (5th edition) paper formatting rules to ensure your document meets the required standards. This guide covers font, margins, spacing, title page, headers, and bibliography formatting.

Paper Formatting

Below are the core formatting requirements for papers written in OSCOLA (5th edition) style.

Font
12 pt Times New Roman
Font Size
12 pt
Margins
1 inch on all sides
Spacing
Double-spaced for body text; single-spaced for footnotes and bibliography
Title Page
Title, author name, module/course, tutor name, and submission date — format varies by institution
Headers / Page Numbers
Page numbers in the upper-right or bottom-center; footnote numbers are superscript in body text

Bibliography Formatting

Your bibliography must follow these rules to be correctly formatted in OSCOLA style:

  1. A long work has a table of cases and a table of legislation at the start; the bibliography at the back lists secondary sources only
  2. Table of Cases: list alphabetically by case name, in roman type, with the full citation
  3. Table of Legislation: list statutes alphabetically, then statutory instruments
  4. Bibliography: list secondary sources alphabetically by author's surname, with initials in place of forenames and no full stop at the end of an entry
  5. Do not use ibid or other Latin gadgets such as op cit and supra. The 4th edition allowed ibid; the 5th edition (2026) does not — cite the short name and the footnote number instead, as in Smith (n 4) 42
  6. In footnotes, case names are italicised and legislation is not
  7. Paragraph pinpoints go in square brackets straight after the citation, as in [15], with no 'at'; page pinpoints stand alone
  8. A case with no medium neutral citation takes a court identifier in brackets after the report: (HL), (PC), (CA), (KBD), (QBD), (Ch D) or (Fam). Cases decided before 1865 need none
  9. Changed since the 4th edition: ibid is dropped; a neutral citation is now a medium neutral citation, never invented for a pre-2001 case; High Court identifiers are KBD, QBD, Ch D and Fam; an Act's short form goes in single quotation marks; websites prefer a persistent link or DOI to an access date; and new rules cover social media, podcasts and generative AI
  10. The OSCOLA output generated on this site follows the 4th-edition CSL style, because no 5th-edition CSL style has been published in the Citation Style Language repository yet. Adjust it by hand: replace any ibid with the short name and (n X), use the 5th-edition court identifiers, put an Act's short form in single quotation marks, and prefer a persistent link or DOI to an access date

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Frequently Asked Questions

What font and size should I use for OSCOLA format?
OSCOLA (5th edition) requires 12 pt Times New Roman. The standard font size is 12 pt.
What are the margin requirements for OSCOLA?
OSCOLA papers require 1 inch on all sides. This applies to the top, bottom, left, and right margins of every page.
Does OSCOLA require a title page?
Title, author name, module/course, tutor name, and submission date — format varies by institution

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