oscola-verifylisted

# OSCOLA Verification The error this exists to catch is not a missing full stop. It is a High Court decision cited as Supreme Court authority, a case cited for a proposition it does not contain, or a pinpoint to a paragraph that says something else. Those survive proofreading because the citation *looks* right, and they are the ones that collapse under questioning. Formatting is checked too, but second. ## Order of checking Substance before form. A perfectly formatted citation to the wrong court is worse than a messy citation to the right one, because it is harder to spot. ### 1. Retrieval status Every authority gets one tag. This is the first thing to establish and the most important. - `[RETRIEVED]` — the text was fetched this session or supplied by the user. Name the source. - `[RECALLED — VERIFY]` — believed correct from background knowledge, not checked against the document. **This tag means the citation is not yet safe to submit.** - `[UNVERIFIABLE]` — searched for and not located. Report the count of each at the top of the output. A draft with eleven `[RECALLED — VERIFY]` citations is not ready, however well formatted. Never upgrade a tag without actually retrieving the document. Never invent a citation to fill a gap in the footnotes. ### 2. Court level and bench strength Check the court named on the face of the judgment against the court named in the footnote. This check must be performed individually for every case. It is tedious and it is the reason the