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.
These are known as ‘citation footnotes’ or ‘legislative history footnotes’.
In Lawmaker, you can automatically generate citation footnotes for any tagged external reference in an SI or SSI.
This feature uses data from http://legislation.gov.uk to generate footnotes that contain the citation of the external reference and summarised amendment history of the referenced provision.
How to generate a citation footnote
Prior to insert a citation footnote, you need to tag the external reference (see https://lawmaker.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/USERMANUAL/pages/500203522/References#How-to-%E2%80%9Ctag%E2%80%9D-references ).
Then, you can trigger the generation of a citation footnote in a number of ways:
Click on the tagged reference and select Tools menu>Insert citation footnote,
Right-click on the tagged reference in the Editor and select Insert citation footnote, or
Click on the tagged reference and use the keyboard shortcut Alt+Shift+f
Lawmaker will extract the information from http://legislation.gov.uk textual amendments and generate the citation footnote.
If a footnote already exists for a reference and you insert a citation footnote, the original content of the footnote is preserved: the citation footnote will be inserted after the existing text.
Currently, it is only possible to generate one citation footnote at the time.
The automatic generation of citation footnotes is still in beta as there are a number of edge cases that that may need further refinement in future. Subsequent versions of Lawmaker will update this feature and make it more robust.
All the references generated within the citation footnote are links to http://legislation.gov.uk . You can open the links by double-clicking on the tagged reference and selecting the ‘Goto ref’ button on the floating reference toolbar. The page will open in a new tab.
Citation footnote output
A citation footnote generated by Lawmaker will always contain the citation of the external reference.
The amending history information will only be provided if the external reference is a specific provision reference (section, regulation, article, rule or lower) such as "section 9 of the Companies Act 2006", and only if such information is available on legislation.gov.uk.
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
The output of the citation footnote therefore will depend on the external reference type, as shown in the summary table below
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. |
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.
For instance, if the external reference is ‘section 9 of the Companies Act 2006’, the citation footnote will present the amended provision as “section 9” (“2006 c. 46. Section 9 was amended by…)
On the other hand, if the external reference is more specific and provides exact subsections, paragraphs, or other granular details, the amended provision in the citation footnote will be generalised to the corresponding high-level provision.
For instance, if the external reference is "section 1(1)(a) of the Abusive Behaviour and Sexual Harm (Scotland) Act 2016" the citation footnote will present the amended provision as "section 1" (“2016 asp 22. Section 1 was amended by paragraph 11(2) of the Schedule to the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018”)
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’).
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.
"Cannot generate citation footnote” message
This feature relies on the data from http://legislation.gov.uk to generate footnotes. Sometimes, http://legislation.gov.uk might be unresponsive due to server errors or other issues and therefore Lawmaker will not be able to retrieve the necessary information.
In this happens, 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 ” 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.