Legal documents often contain references to either other documents, or other parts (of the same document). The use of references is meant to reduce the complexity of the documents; however, they pose serious concerns for the formal (logical) representation of the norms stipulated in the document itself. We propose an approach to directly model the references in a logic language and to resolve them during the computation of the legal effects in force in a case. The approach is proved to be computationally feasible and to have an efficient algorithmic implementation.