When referring to an article in a legal journal or a decision of a court, I have included its recognized citation. This is standard practice, and, though I have kept such references to an absolute minimum, they are there in the hope that you might wish to peruse some of these sources in their complete and original form.
The method of citing legal journals or law reviews is fairly straightforward and requires no exposition here. The subject of case citations, on the other hand, is one of huge and complex proportions that would require a chapter-length elucidation. In any event, unlike lawyers and law students of my generation (who were obliged to search the shelves of dusty tomes in pursuit of an elusive law report), today’s search engines provide instant Internet access to cases merely by keying in the names of the parties. There are, in addition, an assortment of databases which provide full text retrieval of cases, legislation, and law review articles. The best known (and probably the most comprehensive) are LexisNexis and Westlaw. Both contain an extensive selection of legal documents. A number of websites, many of them free, include bailii.org, lawreports.co.uk, europa.eu, echr.coe.int, worldlii.org, and findlaw.com.
An excellent account of how to unearth the law is to be found in James A. Holland and Julian S. Webb, Learning Legal Rules: A Student’s Guide to Legal Method and Reasoning, 8th edition (Oxford University Press, 2013), chapter 2.
In order to make sense of the references in this book, however, the following should suffice. Take the English case of Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] A.C. 562 (H.L.) mentioned on pages 45–6. In a civil decision such as this, the name of the case is normally dictated by those of the parties: Mrs Donoghue sued Mr Stevenson. The date in square brackets signifies that the year is an essential part of the reference. Round brackets indicate that the year is not of major importance, though it is included as a matter of course. ‘A.C.’ is an abbreviation of Appeal Cases, the name of the official report in which the decision appears. The number that follows is the page on which the case appears. ‘(H.L.)’ is an abbreviation for the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords, which decided the case. That court has, as mentioned in Chapter 2, now been replaced by the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom; its judgments are cited as [2015] UKSC 88.
The approach is slightly different in the United States. For example, in the Supreme Court case of Brown v Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) discussed on pages 102, 128, and 131, Brown is the plaintiff, the Board of Education the defendant. The number 347 is the volume number of the reports in which the case appears. ‘U.S.’ is the abbreviation of United States Reports. The number 483 refers to the page on which the report begins, and 1954 is the year in which the judgment was delivered.
The system adopted in Europe and several other countries, as well as a detailed account of the major common law citation conventions, and those of other courts, such as the European Court of Human Rights, are concisely set out on this fact sheet: <http://portal.solent.ac.uk/library/help/factsheets/resources/referencing-law-harvard.pdf>.