Legal sources break a reference list because they are not publications with authors. A statute has no author and a judgment is identified by where it was reported rather than by who wrote it, so the author–date machinery that handles a journal article has nothing to grip. APA 7 solves this by handing the job to somebody else, and the somebody else it names does not cover Nigeria. This page sets out what actually fills that gap and gives you the forms.
This is not only a law-project problem. An education project citing the National Policy on Education, a public administration project citing an enabling Act, a business project citing a regulator’s governing statute — all of them hit the same wall. Our guide to what referencing style Nigerian universities require covers which style governs you; this page covers what to do once you know.
What APA 7 actually says about legal sources
APA does not publish legal citation rules of its own. The University of Queensland Library’s APA 7th guide, which is built on the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th edition (2019), states the position plainly on its legal sources page: the Publication Manual refers to The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation for referencing legal publications, “However, this does not cover Australian materials.”
Read that sentence with Nigeria in the place of Australia and you have the whole problem. The Bluebook is the United States system. It does not cover Nigerian statutes, Nigerian law reports or Nigerian neutral citations, and no amount of APA formatting will make it. UQ’s own answer is to use the national system instead, and it rebuilt its legal examples on the Australian Guide to Legal Citation.
So the honest instruction for a Nigerian project is this: APA 7 governs everything in your reference list except the legal authorities, and the legal authorities follow the Nigerian convention, presented consistently. That is not a loophole. It is what the style itself directs you to do.
What your own university permits
Obafemi Awolowo University’s Postgraduate College, in its Guidelines for Writing Theses for Higher Degrees dated January 2026, does not mandate one style. It lists seven and allows others: American Psychological Association (APA), Modern Language Association (MLA), Chicago, Vancouver, Harvard, the Oxford Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities (OSCOLA), and American Medical Association (AMA), “or any other one applicable to specific faculties or disciplines”. It adds a condition students routinely miss: the latest version applicable must be used.
OSCOLA being on that list matters. It is the system built for legal authorities, it is what most Nigerian law faculties work from, and it is the answer to “APA cannot do this” for a law project. If you are in law, ask your faculty whether OSCOLA is expected before you format anything.
OAU also requires, among the preliminary pages, a LIST OF CASES/STATUTES, described in the guidelines as applicable to candidates from some faculties such as the Faculty of Law. That page is a separate apparatus from your reference list, and it is dealt with at the end of this guide.
The Nigerian case form, from a Nigerian university’s own manual
The University of Ibadan publishes its own house style, the University of Ibadan Manual of Style, in the Revised Edition 2023 of its postgraduate guidelines. Its citation samples include a section on court cases, and one of its three worked examples is Nigerian:
Musa v. The State (2009) 15 NWLR (Pt. 1165) 467
The other two in the same list are an American case and an English one, which is itself instructive: the manual expects you to cite each jurisdiction in its own form rather than flattening them all into one shape.
That Nigerian citation has six slots. Learn them once and you can read or build any reported Nigerian citation.
| Slot | In the example | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Case name | Musa v. The State | The parties, italicised in most house styles. Criminal appeals commonly read as a name against The State or against the Federal Republic of Nigeria. |
| Year | (2009) | Round brackets here, because the report series is organised by volume number and the year is extra information rather than the locator. |
| Volume | 15 | The volume of the series for that year. |
| Series | NWLR | Nigerian Weekly Law Reports, the most commonly cited Nigerian series. |
| Part | (Pt. 1165) | The part number within the volume. NWLR is published in parts, and omitting this makes the citation unusable. |
| Page | 467 | The page on which the report starts. |
Round brackets or square brackets?
This is the single most common formatting error, and the rule behind it is mechanical rather than arbitrary. The University of Queensland’s APA 7 legal guide sets out the same distinction for Australian reports, and it transfers directly:
- Round brackets where the series is organised by volume. The volume number finds the case; the year is supporting information. That is the NWLR pattern above.
- Square brackets where the series is organised by year. Without the year you cannot find the report at all, so it becomes part of the locator.
Ask one question of any report series: could I find this case if the year were missing? If yes, round brackets. If no, square.
This walkthrough from a university law library covers how a case citation is assembled and read. Its rules are the American system’s, not Nigeria’s, so take the anatomy and not the abbreviations.
Neutral citations, and how to read the court code
Where a judgment has not been reported in a commercial series, or where you want a citation that anyone can verify for free, use the media neutral citation. NigeriaLII, the Nigerian member of the free access to law movement, publishes judgments with the neutral citation as an explicit labelled field on every judgment page, alongside a copy-citation control, the court name, the case number and the judgment date.
A judgment page read on NigeriaLII on 13 September 2026 gives its full citation as:
AMBASSADOR ALH. SHEHU OTHMAN MALAMI, OFR & Another v MR. IMONKHUEDE OHIKHUARE & Others (SC. 373/2015) [2017] NGSC 5 (22 June 2017)
and its media neutral citation, in its own field, as [2017] NGSC 5. Four things are packed in there:
(SC. 373/2015)— the court’s own suit number, which is how the registry knows the case.[2017]— square brackets, because a neutral citation is always organised by year.NGSC— the court code. NG for Nigeria, then the court: NGSC Supreme Court of Nigeria, NGCA Court of Appeal, NGFCHC Federal High Court. Other Nigerian courts follow the same pattern.5— the fifth judgment of that court entered for that year, not a page number.
One limitation you must know before relying on NigeriaLII. Its judgment collection is substantial but not current: the most recent judgments listed across its courts, read on 13 September 2026, are from 2017 and 2018. For recent authority you will need a commercial database or the faculty library. Our comparison of Nigerian legal research databases ranks the options and prices them.
Citing a Nigerian Act
Nigerian federal statutes are cited in one of two ways depending on whether they sit inside the consolidation.
Inside the Laws of the Federation of Nigeria 2004. The consolidation assigns each Act a chapter number, and that chapter number is the citation. A genuine example, taken from the long title of a later Act that repealed it:
Nigerian Education Bank Act Cap. N104, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria, 2004
The shape is: short title, then Cap., then the chapter letter and number, then Laws of the Federation of Nigeria, 2004. Many writers abbreviate the last part to LFN 2004; either is acceptable so long as you do not switch between them within one project.
Enacted after the consolidation. An Act passed since 2004 is cited by its short title and year, because it has no chapter number yet. The same document that supplies the example above is itself cited this way:
Students Loans (Access to Higher Education) Act, 2023
That Act’s own text, read on Law Nigeria on 13 September 2026, states its commencement as the 12th day of June, 2023, and its long title records that it repeals the Nigerian Education Bank Act Cap. N104, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria, 2004 and provides interest-free loans through the Nigeria Education Loan Fund. Note the housekeeping that follows from a repeal: if you cite a Cap. that has since been repealed, you must say so, because an examiner who knows the field will notice.
A section within an Act. Give the section after the citation, and be consistent about the abbreviation. s. 3 and section 3 are both fine; Sec 3 in one chapter and S.3 in the next is not.
Subsidiary legislation. Regulations, orders and rules made under an Act are cited by their own title and year, and it is good practice to name the parent Act on first mention so the reader can see the authority they were made under.
In-text citation, in an APA project
Where your project is otherwise in APA 7 and you have a handful of legal authorities, the workable practice is to give the full citation in the text on first mention and keep the legal authorities out of the alphabetical reference list, in their own list. That is exactly what OAU’s LIST OF CASES/STATUTES preliminary page exists for.
So: The Students Loans (Access to Higher Education) Act, 2023 provides for interest-free loans through the Nigeria Education Loan Fund (s. 3). On later mentions a short form is enough: the 2023 Act, or for a case, the first party’s name.
Whatever you choose, write the rule down and apply it to every authority. Consistency is what an examiner actually checks; house-style purity is not.
The list of cases and statutes page
OAU’s guidelines put this page among the preliminaries, between the list of plates and the list of appendices, and note it applies to candidates from some faculties such as Law. In practice it is built as two lists, each alphabetical or chronological by convention of your faculty, each entry followed by the page or pages of your project where the authority is discussed. Where your departmental format guide is silent on the ordering, cases alphabetically by first party and statutes chronologically by year is the safest default, and say in a one-line note at the head of each list which ordering you used.
Where to get the text, free and paid
| Source | What it gives | The catch, verified on 13 September 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| NigeriaLII (nigerialii.org) | Judgments with labelled media neutral citations, court, case number and date; gazettes; documents and guidelines | Its Legislation section returns zero documents — you cannot get Act texts there — and its newest judgments are from 2017–2018 |
| Law Nigeria (lawnigeria.com) | Federal and state laws, including arrangements of sections, long titles and commencement dates | Full texts are paywalled beyond the opening sections; the laws. subdomain fails over HTTPS, while the apex domain serves normally |
| Commercial databases | Current reported judgments with headnotes and citators | Subscription; see our database comparison for what each one costs a student |
| Faculty library | The printed law reports the citation actually refers to | Free, and the only place to confirm a part and page number you are unsure of |
Six mistakes a law panel flags
- Dropping the part number.
(2009) 15 NWLR 467is not findable. NWLR volumes are published in parts and the part number is load-bearing. - Round and square brackets used interchangeably. They encode whether the series is organised by volume or by year. Pick per series, not per sentence.
- Citing a repealed Cap. as current law. Check whether a later Act repealed it, and if it did, cite the current Act and mention the repeal.
- Putting statutes in the alphabetical reference list. They belong in the list of cases and statutes, which is a preliminary page.
- Citing a case from a secondary summary. If you have not seen the report or the judgment, you cannot vouch for the page number. Get the text or drop the authority.
- Letting a chatbot generate the citation. Fabricated case citations are common, plausible and trivially checkable, and a fabricated authority in a law project is a far more serious finding than a formatting slip. Our guide to whether you can use AI in a Nigerian project covers where the line sits.
Before you bind
Run one pass over every legal authority in the project and ask three questions of each: have I opened the text, does the bracket type match the series, and does it appear on the list of cases and statutes with the right page? Then check that the background and statement of the problem cite the same authorities in the same form as the body chapters, because that is where inconsistency usually hides.
Keeping two lists consistent across five chapters is exactly the kind of work that is better automated than remembered. Tesify holds your citations against the sentences that use them and builds the list as you write, in the style your department requires — 100% written by you, alongside 9,000+ students and 15,000+ chapters.
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Frequently asked questions
Can I cite a Nigerian case in APA 7?
Not in an APA-specific form, because APA has none. The Publication Manual defers to the Bluebook for legal materials, and the Bluebook does not cover Nigerian materials. Use the Nigerian convention for the authority itself, keep APA for everything else, and apply one rule consistently.
What does NWLR stand for?
Nigerian Weekly Law Reports, the most commonly cited Nigerian commercial series. Its citations carry a part number in addition to the volume, and the part number is required.
Why is the year sometimes in square brackets?
Because that series is organised by year rather than by volume, so the year is part of the locator. Round brackets are used where a volume number finds the case on its own. Neutral citations always use square brackets.
What is a media neutral citation?
A citation that does not depend on any publisher’s report series: year in square brackets, a court code, and the sequential number of that judgment for that court and year. NigeriaLII prints it as a labelled field on every judgment page.
What does NGSC mean?
Supreme Court of Nigeria. NG is the country, SC the court. NGCA is the Court of Appeal and NGFCHC the Federal High Court; other Nigerian courts follow the same pattern.
How do I cite an Act that is in the Laws of the Federation of Nigeria 2004?
Short title, then Cap. and the chapter letter and number, then Laws of the Federation of Nigeria, 2004 — for example, Nigerian Education Bank Act Cap. N104, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria, 2004. Abbreviating to LFN 2004 is acceptable if you do it everywhere.
How do I cite an Act passed after 2004?
By short title and year, because it has no chapter number in the consolidation yet. For example, the Students Loans (Access to Higher Education) Act, 2023.
Should I use OSCOLA instead of APA for a law project?
Ask your faculty. OSCOLA is designed for legal authorities and is among the styles OAU’s postgraduate guidelines expressly permit, and most Nigerian law faculties work from it. Whichever you are told, use the latest applicable version.
Can I get Nigerian Acts free from NigeriaLII?
Not at present. Checked on 13 September 2026, its Legislation section returns zero documents. Its judgment collection is real but its newest entries are from 2017 and 2018.
Do statutes go in my reference list?
Not in the alphabetical author–date list. They go in the list of cases and statutes among the preliminary pages, which OAU’s guidelines name as a required preliminary for candidates in faculties such as Law.
My project is not a law project but cites one Act. What do I do?
Give the full citation in the text on first mention and use a short form afterwards. A single authority does not need a separate preliminary page unless your department asks for one.