Legal citation

The widely-accepted system for created citations to Canadian legislative materials (e.g., Parliamentary reports, cases, and legislation) is the McGill Law Journal's Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation, which is also referred to as the McGill Guide. The McGill Guide is available on a two-hour reserve through the RRU Library and can be signed out at the Circulation Desk; however, if you're not studying on-campus, please refer to the Legal Citation Help Guide for an introduction to legal citations, as well as the UBC Law Library's Legal Citation Guide, which provides a comprehensive explanation of the McGill Guide's rules. The UBC Law Library's Legal Citation Guide also provides information on how to cite international law sources (e.g., United Nations' resolutions).

When you're creating a legal citation, please follow the format noted in the Legal Citation Help Guide; in other words, you don't need to format the legal citations to fit APA Style standards. For example, legal citations appear in footnotes, rather than as in-text citations (unless you're writing a legal memoranda or facta). For a concise summary, a list of common example citations and tips is included in this Legal Citation Checklist. If you are citing other types of resources (referred to as "Secondary sources", or "Non-parliamentary reports" in the UBC Law Library's Legal Citation Guide), please follow the rules of the appropriate edition of the APA Style manual (e.g., APA Style 7th ed.)

Please refer to WriteAnswers for additional examples as well as more detailed information on less common types of legal sources.