to benefit New Zealand
Foundation funds new Law Style Guide
1st December 2009
New Zealand now has a national uniform style and citation guide for legal writing. This follows the launch by Justice John McGrath of the New Zealand Law Style Guide on 26 November.
Funded by the New Zealand Law Foundation, the book is the result of the combined efforts of many in the profession.
Justice Chambers of the Court of Appeal spearheaded the project, leading a working group that included representatives from the six law schools as well as New Zealand's three leading legal publishers, Thomson Reuters, Lexis Nexis and CCH.
The three named authors of the guide, Geoff McLay of Victoria University's law faculty, Christopher Murray, student editor-in-chief of the VUW Law Review, and Jonathan Orpin, barrister and former Court of Appeal judge's clerk, were principally responsible for its drafting.
Justice Chambers said that those responsible for the guide hoped everyone working in the law in New Zealand, including lawyers involved with the courts, would adopt the new guide quickly.
Even before it was launched, a significant group had adopted it for use from January 2010. This included the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeal, New Zealand's six law schools, the country's three main legal publishers and major law reviews.
As well as the two highest courts, many other courts and tribunals have also decided to adopt, as from the guide's start date of 1 January 2010, its neutral citation system for their decisions.
Law schools, law firms, publishers and courts have, up to this point, all been using their own individual styles when referring to legal material.
This has created confusion and much time-consuming work, as it required anyone writing about the law constantly to translate references to legal material from one format to another. The comprehensive new guide, its authors hope, will make that a thing of the past.
The guide will be available free on the Law Foundation website in late December 2009 at www.lawfoundation.org.nz but is available to buy in hard copy from Thomson Reuters www.thomsonreuters.co.nz/catalogue/new-zealand-law-style-guide-2009
Source: LawTalk 742, 30 November 2009