SIs and SSIs often include references to other laws and regulations (such as Acts, other SIs or EU legislation). These references are often accompanied by a footnote which provides the citation of the reference and its legislative history, showing how the referenced provision has been amended by other legislation over time.
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In this case the footnote will contain both citation and amending history information, and the structure of the footnote will be the following: citation+amended provision+amending history information
For instance: 2016 asp 22. Section 1 was amended by paragraph 11(2) of the Schedule to the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018.
2016 asp 22 is the citation of the external reference
Section 1 is the amended provision
paragraph 11(2) of the Schedule to the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018 is the amendment history information
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External reference type | Example of external reference | Citation footnote output | Example of citation footnote output |
Document reference | Companies Act 2006 | Citation only | 2006 c. 46. |
‘Grouping’ reference (e.g. Part, Chapter, Schedule, etc.) | Part 1 of the Companies Act 2006 | Citation only | 2006 c. 46. |
Specific provision reference (e.g. section, regulation, article, rule or lower) | section 9 of the Companies Act 2006 | Citation and amending history (when available) | 2006 c. 46. Section 9 was amended by section 3(2)(a) and (b), 72(2), 29(2), 2(b) and (a) and 28(2) of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 and section 93(3) and (2)(a) and (b) of, and paragraph 4 of Schedule 3 to, the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act 2015. |
Citation
Amended provision
When the external reference mentions a high-level provision, such as "section" or "regulation," the corresponding amended provision in the citation footnote will remain unchanged and match the high-level reference.
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Amending history information
The amending history information is extracted from the textual amendments available on legislation.gov.uk (also known as ‘F-notes' or 'footnotes’).
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More specifically - when generating a citation footnote - Lawmaker will first request the XML of the external reference from legislation.gov.uk, then it will extract all textual amendments from the XML , and finally it will convert each textual amendment into an amending statement which will be appended to the citation.
In order to do so, Lawmaker requires that the data provided by legislation.gov.uk follows a certain structure and format.
When a textual amendment deviates from the expected format, Lawmaker will consider it as unintelligible and will not be able to extract the information.
In this case, it will provide the following message in brackets within the citation footnote “(<Amended provision> has amendments that couldn't be processed when generating this footnote)”.
This means that textual amendments were found on legislation.gov.uk but it was not possible to process them and insert them into the citation footnote.
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"Cannot generate citation footnote” message
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This feature relies on the data from http://legislation.gov.uk to generate footnotes. Sometimes, http://legislation.gov.uk might be unresponsive (e.g. server error due to server errors or other issues ) and therefore Lawmaker might will not be able to retrieve the needed necessary information.
In this casehappens, when you try to add a citation footnote, you will see the error message “Cannot generate citation footnote. Unable to retrieve data from http://legislation.gov.uk ” will be displayed and no citation footnote will be inserted in the Editor.
These issues with legislaton.gov.uk are often temporary, so you can try to generate the citation footnote again after some time.