In this example, we have a criminal case which we found on Westlaw.
We can tell it's a criminal case because it's The Crown against, “R” against, a particular individual
and there's also quite a big clue that it's in the Court of Appeal Criminal Division.
You'll see underneath the name of the case
there's a whole bunch of different references to it that you get from Westlaw.
So, we have R. v. (the crown against) Paul Stromberg.
Then we've got a neutral citation, 2018 EWCA Crim 561.
Various law report citations as well, so one to the Queen's Bench Reports,
another one to the Weekly Law Reports,
one to, I think that's another Westlaw internal reference -
it's an old thing.
And finally we have a report in the Criminal Appeal Reports.
So there's a whole bunch of different places in which this case has been reported.
So what do we do to turn that into an OSCOLA reference?
Simply this,
we take the names of the parties and put them in italics.
We remove the punctuation, so the dot after the “R”, the dot after the “v” - they both go.
We then use the neutral citation as it is, 2018 EWCA Crim 561,
and then the first of the law report citations.
Westlaw is very good.
Lexus is the same in that it will put the different reports,
if it's been reported in more than one series of law reports,
in to order of precedence.
So it's normally pretty safe to take the first one
and, again, take the punctuation out of it.
You'll also see that the Westlaw list of references has semicolons between them;
OSCOLA prefers commas.
So that's it.
We've taken the dots out after the “Q” and the “B”.
We've used the first of the law reports, we've coupled it with a neutral citation,
we've italicised the bits, lost all the punctuation
and replaced the semicolon with a comma.
That's how to go from Westlaw to OSCOLA.