oscola-build-citation

oscola-build-citation is a skill for Claude Code from uk-agents/uk-legal-plugins. It costs 100 tokens per session (1,421 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A citation tool for UK legal sources that first checks whether a case, statute, statutory instrument, Hansard reference, or journal article exists, then formats the result in OSCOLA. OSCOLA is the standard legal citation system used in UK academic writing.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to verify a partial UK legal reference and construct an OSCOLA citation from the verified source information.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of producing a correctly formatted citation for a source that does not exist or has incorrect identifying details.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the law-student-uk plugin — 13 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to verify a partial UK legal reference and construct an OSCOLA citation from the verified source information.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/uk-agents/uk-legal-plugins/oscola-build-citation
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add uk-agents/uk-legal-plugins --skill oscola-build-citation
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/uk-agents/uk-legal-plugins

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install law-student-uk, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 13 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for oscola-build-citation

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/uk-agents/uk-legal-plugins/oscola-build-citation/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/uk-agents/uk-legal-plugins/oscola-build-citation)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/uk-agents/uk-legal-plugins/oscola-build-citation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/uk-agents/uk-legal-plugins/oscola-build-citation/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for oscola-build-citation

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/uk-agents/uk-legal-plugins/oscola-build-citation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/uk-agents/uk-legal-plugins/oscola-build-citation.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 100 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,421 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00100 $0.01421
Opus 5 $0.00050 $0.00711
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00284
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00142

Measured 9d ago against content hash e05d23954609, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

oscola-build-citation scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

law-student-uk/skills/oscola-build-citation/SKILL.md · 135 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 135 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/oscola-build-citation

  1. Identify the source type: case / statute / SI / Hansard / journal article.
  2. Verify first: citations_resolve(input=...) with the identifier the user gave.
  3. If not_found, stop — tell the user; do not format an unverified citation.
  4. If resolved, build OSCOLA from the authoritative fields in the result.
  5. Tag [uk-legal MCP — verified]; note any discrepancy with the user's input.

Purpose

Construct a correctly formatted OSCOLA citation for a UK legal source — after verifying that the source exists in the UK legal record. The failure mode this prevents: an agent formatting plausible-looking OSCOLA fields (correct year bracket style, court abbreviation, report reference) for a source that does not exist, or that differs in key details from what the user provided. Verification before formatting is the discipline.

Workflow

Source discipline: If a uk-legal MCP tool returns empty or errored (status: empty / not_found / upstream_validation / etc.), do NOT supplement from training data or web search. Report the empty result to the user with the tool's next_steps / detail field surfaced, and ask for clarifying information (different spelling of a name, a date range, the source URL) rather than fabricating a plausible-looking answer. Empty results are HONEST signal — not a failure mode to paper over.

Step 1 — Identify the source type

Determine which source type the user is asking to cite:

Type Examples
Case R v Brown, Donoghue v Stevenson, a neutral citation
Statute Housing Act 1988, Equality Act 2010, a section reference
SI SI 2021/1234, a short title
Hansard HL Deb vol N col M, a member's speech reference
Journal article Author, title, journal, volume

If the source type is ambiguous from the user's request, ask before proceeding.

Step 2 — Verify first

Call citations_resolve(input=...) with whatever identifier the user provided: a neutral citation, statute short title, SI number, Hansard column reference, or URI.

Read the full file on GitHub · 135 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 135 lines · 100 tokens per session scan A e05d23954609

Subscribe to this mod's changes

oscola-build-citation is a skill published in the GitHub repository uk-agents/uk-legal-plugins (9 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 100 tokens to every session and 1,421 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.