Getting Started with the NZ Law Style Guide
What the Style Guide is, how footnotes work, and the conventions that apply to every citation you write.
If you are studying law in New Zealand, you will be using the New Zealand Law Style Guide. It is the citation style used by the New Zealand law schools, the courts, and the New Zealand legal journals.
Unlike referencing styles such as APA or Harvard, the Style Guide relies on footnotes rather than in-text citations. A footnote tells your reader exactly where your information came from and lets them find the original.
This guide follows the 3rd edition, published in 2018 by the Law Foundation New Zealand.
How a footnote works
Put the footnote number at the end of the sentence, after the full stop (r 2.2.2). One footnote can carry more than one source.
The first time you cite a source, give it in full. Every later reference to the same source is shortened, and how you shorten it depends on whether the reader can already tell which source you mean. That is the subject of its own guide.
The conventions behind every citation
A handful of rules apply no matter what you are citing. They are worth learning once.
- Full stops
- Abbreviations take no full stops. Write “NZLR”, “ed”, “Ltd”, not “N.Z.L.R.” (r 1.1.2).
- Italics
- Case names, book titles, journal names as part of a report series, and ship names are italicised. Article titles and chapter titles are not; they take quotation marks.
- Quotation marks
- Double, not single. An article title is “Birks’ Unjust Enrichment” (r 1.1.5).
- Pinpoints
- Introduced by the word “at”, not by a bare comma. It is “at 55”, never “, 55” (r 3.2.8).
- Ranges
- Written out in full. It is “360–365”, never “360–65” (r 1.2.3(a)).
- Numbers
- Numerals, except whole numbers under 10, which are written out. Use commas from 1,000 up (r 1.2.3(a)).
- Dates
- Always “28 October 1965” (r 1.2.3(b)).
- Macrons
- Māori, Ngāti, Tākitimu, te Tiriti. Reproduce them wherever the source carries them.
Round brackets or square
The brackets around a year are not decoration. They tell the reader how the series is organised.
Square brackets mean the year is what identifies the volume, so you need it to find the case. Round brackets mean the series has its own running volume numbers, and the year is extra information.
Four New Zealand series changed convention partway through their life, so the right bracket can depend on the year of the report (r 3.2.3(b)). Pincite works this out for you from the series and the year.
What the Style Guide does not cover
The Style Guide does not have a rule for everything, and it says so. Chapter 10 states that it covers only the more commonly used international materials and points elsewhere for the rest.
Where there is no rule, Pincite does not offer a source type. That is deliberate. A citation form invented to fill a gap is worse than no form at all, because you cannot check it against anything.
Last reviewed 6 August 2026