OSCOLA 5th edition CSL style (EU/international law + academic sources)

hasezer

Since OSCOLA released its 5th edition in 2026, the official Zotero style hasn't been updated to match — several rule changes (no more "ibid", ECLI-based CJEU citations, italicised thesis titles) aren't reflected.

I built a community style covering the 5th edition, with particular attention to EU legislation, CJEU/international case law, treaties, and tribunals (ICJ, ICC, ECtHR), plus standard academic sources.

GitHub: https://github.com/hasezer/Oscola-5 EU-Law-csl

Happy to take feedback — there are a lot of edge cases in legal citation and I'd rather fix them for everyone than have people work around them.

damnation

The CSL repository is by definition a community style repository. Why not make a PR?
https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/

mvts

In terms of a PR, also see: https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/pull/8115

hasezer

Thanks for the suggestion. That's fair, and I did look into it.

The main thing holding me back is licensing: OSCOLA's own materials are published under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, and I licensed this style the same way out of respect for that. The official CSL repo requires CC-BY-SA without the NC clause, so a PR would mean stripping that restriction, which feels like the wrong call for something that directly implements another organisation's citation rules, even if the legal risk in practice is probably low.

There's also a practical reason: this is a fairly new style covering a lot of edge cases (EU legislation, CJEU/ICJ/ECtHR/ICC citations, treaties), and I'd rather let it get some real world mileage and bug reports while I can still iterate quickly, before putting it through a formal review process.

Happy to revisit a PR down the line once it's more tested and I've had a chance to think through the licensing side properly.