Referencing and avoiding plagiarism: OSCOLA Cases Video 1

Video titled: Referencing and avoiding plagiarism: OSCOLA Cases Video 1

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I have a recent case from Westlaw. It's the case of Daniel Blanche against the EasyJet Airline Company, Limited. It's quite an interesting case, which is to do with compensation for travellers on delayed flights, but that's not really important right now. What we want to do here is to know how to reference this case in OSCOLA.

So the things that we need to pick out of it, first of all, are the names of the parties and the neutral citation. You'll see here that the case has not been reported anywhere else. All we have is a neutral citation and the strange Westlaw reference that is an internal thing to Westlaw, which does not form part of any sort of OSCOLA reference.

So we'd start referencing this by saying “Blanche”, -we don't need to say his first name because it's pretty obvious who it is, and OSCOLA doesn't like unnecessary details. So here we have Blanche and EasyJet Airline Company Limited. You'll notice that we've italicised the names of both the parties together with a “v” in between them as well, but the neutral citation is in normal font; 2019 (in square brackets), EWCA Civ (Courts of Appeals Civil Division), 69 there, meaning it's the 69th case that the Court of Appeal, Civil Division, has heard in 2019.

If we want, then, to reference part of the judgment itself this is how we do it. So let's say we want to refer particularly to the part that says in paragraph 15 here, “in my view, Recital 15 could not be clearer.” So we want to make a reference to paragraph 15. So we build on the reference that we've built already by adding paragraph 15 to the end of it, and we do that just by putting the paragraph number in square brackets. No commas, no punctuation; OSCOLA hates punctuation, by and large. If we want to be really precise in our citing here, and attribute the quote from paragraph 15 to the judge that made it, the thing to do is to scroll back up the judgment itself until you get to the part that tells you who's speaking. And here we can see it's Lord Justice Coulson. So we complete our reference by putting his name in round brackets at the end and again, abbreviating it to Coulson LJ (Lord Justice Coulson) so that complete reference refers to the case of Blanche and EasyJet Airline Company Limited, 69th case before the Courts of Appeal, Civil Division, in 2019 at paragraph 15 in the words of Lord Justice Coulson.

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