Answered By: Claire Mazer
Last Updated: 27 Feb, 2023     Views: 49

Can I use blog posts / articles from law firms or barristers chambers in my work?

If you are including one or two such pieces in your academic work this should be fine (please check with Brunel Law School first), but you should ensure you have used sufficient academic resources (books and journals) and legal materials (cases, legislation) as part of the sources you are reading and citing in your work. Remember blog posts, although written by legal professionals, are still opinion pieces and therefore subject to bias or may be used to promote the work of the law firm or chambers. As such they are secondary sources. They should not be relied on as the only or main source in your work.

 

How do I reference them?

See 3.4.8 Websites and blogs of OSCOLA for full details on how to cite blog posts.

This example shows how to cite a blog post from a barristers chambers: Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) Drone use is coming. What should Insurers be Doing? - 12 King's Bench Walk (12kbw.co.uk)

As with all online resources you may need to look around the page to retrieve all the details you need to populate your reference / citation both for the footnote and bibliography. The pattern you should use for blog posts is Author, 'Blog post title'  (Blog / website title, date of article) < link > accessed date month year. Note the blog / website title is in italics and the the date of the article should be in the standard date format for OSCOLA which is date month year.

The above blog post would be cited as follows:

Footnote:

Patrick Vincent and Max Archer, ‘Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) Drone use is coming. What should Insurers be Doing?’ (12 King’s Bench Walk, 27 July 2021) <https://www.12kbw.co.uk/beyond-visual-line-of-sight-bvlos-drone-use-is-coming-what-should-insurers-be-doing/ > accessed 11 March 2022.

Bibliography:

Vincent P and Archer M, ‘Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) Drone use is coming. What should Insurers be Doing?’ (12 King’s Bench Walk, 27 July 2021) <https://www.12kbw.co.uk/beyond-visual-line-of-sight-bvlos-drone-use-is-coming-what-should-insurers-be-doing/ > accessed 11 March 2022