ASCOLA
Asuzu’s System for the Citation of Legal Authorities
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
ASCOLA is the citation system Nigerian legal writing has long needed. For decades, lawyers, students, academics, and judges have worked with fragmented, inconsistent, and often imported citation practices. ASCOLA ends that fragmentation. Clear, coherent, and locally grounded, it provides one authoritative method for citing cases, statutes, books, articles, and digital sources across the entire spectrum of Nigerian legal writing.
ASCOLA solves a structural problem: inconsistent citation damages clarity and weakens persuasion. It undermines credibility in briefs, judgments, articles, and classroom writing. ASCOLA restores order by offering a system designed specifically for Nigerian authorities and Nigerian legal publishing. It embodies precision, economy, and elegance, enabling legal writers to express ideas cleanly and support them transparently.
The guide is practical and accessible. Its rules are concise, its examples are drawn from Nigerian sources, and its explanations illuminate the logic behind each convention. Whether writing a scholarly article, preparing lecture notes, drafting an appellate brief, or crafting a judicial opinion, writers will find in ASCOLA a disciplined, reliable structure for presenting authority.
ASCOLA is not just a manual—it is a professional standard. Its adoption will bring much-needed consistency to classrooms, courtrooms, institutions, law firms, and legal departments. It will save time, reduce errors, and elevate the quality of legal communication across the profession. Designed for Nigeria but adaptable to other common-law jurisdictions, ASCOLA stands as a model of clarity shaped by local legal culture.
For every legal writer who values clarity, accuracy, and professionalism, ASCOLA offers the path forward.
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
ASCOLA is a unified, authoritative citation guide designed to meet Nigerian legal standards while satisfying the expectations of academic and professional legal writers across common-law jurisdictions. It provides a single, dependable framework for citing academic, judicial, and statutory authorities in educational, professional, and judicial writing.
Clear, accessible rules and carefully chosen examples, drawn primarily from Nigerian sources, make ASCOLA both practical and scholarly. Its structure allows users to locate guidance quickly, while its explanations justify each rule and illustrate its application.
Adopting ASCOLA will promote uniformity across classrooms, courtrooms, institutions, and law offices, saving time, reducing errors, and improving the quality of legal communication throughout the profession.
About the Author
Chinua Asuzu is Africa’s leading legal-writing scholar.
He’s the author of Brief-Writing Master Plan; Fair Hearing in Nigeria; Judicial Writing: A Benchmark for the Bench; Lexical Luminary: If Not You, Who?; and Uncommon Law of Learned Writing 2.0.
Chinua’s works command professional respect in every English-speaking jurisdiction.
Chinua is the dean of The Write House; the senior partner of Assizes Lawfirm; a Fellow of the Society for Advanced Legal Studies, University of London; and a member of the Commonwealth Association of Legislative Counsel.
Chinua is also a consultant to some of Nigeria’s largest law firms.
A jurisprudent and polymath, Chinua teaches legal writing at law firms and law schools and at private and public forums. He brings to the discipline of legal writing three decades of intensive private study and two decades of extensive public teaching.
Chinua’s expertise spans the gamut of legal writing: academic legal writing, brief-writing, business writing, contract drafting, judicial writing, legislative drafting, and litigation drafting.
An upwrite and writeous autodidact, Chinua is all write.