Legal Citation with the Canadian Open Access Legal Citation Guide (the COAL Guide)

COAL gives guidance on how and when to indicate that a resource has been consulted online within the rules relating to the type of material (book, journal article, case, etc.). You can find COAL's guidance on citing websites/webpages further down this page.

When you do include a URL, COAL recommends, but does not require, that the URL of a cited website/webpage be archived using an open access web archiving tool, such as the Wayback Machine. Please see the image below for guidance on where this tool may be found on the site's home page.

Websites/Webpages

The following guidance is for citing materials found solely or primarily online. For more specific guidance on how to cite online video and audio recordings (section 3.10) or AI-generated material (chapter 8) please check the COAL Guide.

This is the citation pattern for websites:

Author, | "title of website" | (date of the webpage/website) | URL | (accessed date [if applicable] | , archived at URL [if applicable]) | pinpoint [if applicable].

Example: Ariel Katz, "Confidentiality and Privacy in Justice Cromwell's Report: Uses and Misuses" (21 April 2021) arielkatz.org (archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20230628192233/https://arielkatz.org/archives/6774).

Citation Clarification:

A. Author

• The author is whoever wrote the material.
• If the author is an organization, institution, or collective, use the name as it appears.

B. Title 

• Title of the website/webpage as it appears.

C. Date

• Include the most recent date available. If there is both a date created and a date modified listed, choose the date modified and include the word "modified" before the date. 

If no date is listed, use instead the date accessed, preceded by the word "accessed." Note that when this is the date used, it follows the URL (see the citation pattern above).

D. URL

• When the URL spans multiple lines, shorten it to the homepage's URL.
• It is recommended, but not required, to also include an archived URL in parentheses. See the top of this page for more details.