I recently received the following form e-mail from the editors of the Bluebook - the massive tome that is the standard citation system for most law reviews and other legal publications:
The editors of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation are about to embark on the exciting task of making revisions for the forthcoming Nineteenth Edition, and we need your help! We rely on user input to revise The Bluebook and our Survey is an opportunity for you to share your ideas with us as we update The Bluebook in a way that works best for you....
Comments and suggestions are also welcome...
I am grateful to the editors for soliciting my advice. And, as a matter of fact, I do have a suggestion that I hope they will consider: Abolish the Bluebook completely, and replace it with a much simpler citation system, such as the University of Chicago's Maroon Book. It may indeed be an "exciting task" to revise the Bluebook yet again. But I for one would be much more excited to be freed from Bluebook drudgery permanently; so would a great many law students.
I first suggested the abolition of the Bluebook ten years ago, when I was a student at Yale Law School (one of the schools whose law review publishes the Bluebook). Judge Richard Posner, perhaps the most distinguished living legal scholar, proposed the same idea years before, in a 1986 essay. They didn't listen to either of us back then and I'm not holding my breath now. However, I outlined the arguments for abolishing the Bluebook monstrosity in a May 2006 VC, and I hope that the current editors of the Bluebook will at least consider them. Here's a link to the 2006 post. I stand by every word.
Indeed, since 2006 I have become a co-editor of the Supreme Court Economic Review, a faculty-edited journal that uses the Maroon Book (as a result of a decision that predates my tenure as editor). I see no evidence that either the SCER or other scholarly journals that use simplified citation systems suffer in quality as a result. On the other hand, there is a great deal of evidence that Bluebooking wastes an enormous amount of time and effort that could be better spent on other tasks, including ones that might be even more "exciting" than preparing the 19th edition of the Bluebook.
UPDATE: Back in 2006, I also wrote a post on why the Bluebook is unlikely to be abolished or radically reformed, in spite of its manifest wastefulness. I hope that the current editors of the Bluebook prove that post wrong. But, on this issue too, I'm not holding my breath.
UPDATE #2: Daniel Solove, the prominent George Washington University legal scholar, pointed out some serious flaws in the Bluebook in this 2007 post. His general take on the Bluebook is perhaps even harsher than mine:
Most of the time, I've been extremely pleased with the editing I've received on articles. There are, however, some practices that law review editors routinely do that are incredibly silly and annoying. They bother nearly every professor I talk to. And yet they persist. One of the reasons is the Bluebook. The Bluebook is a thick book with a blue cover filled with more rules than the Internal Revenue Code. It is written by a consortium of law reviews and its primary purpose is as a money-making racket.
I really, really, really dislike that too!
alternatives (such as the only mildly recognized maroon book Ilya speaks of) might in fact be slightly better-but the cost of switching at this point is too high.
also-paying $20 a year to buy a very helpful guide that is
a) extremely helpful to practice or for academics
b) a lot of work goes into updating
doesn't seem like a "racket" to me.
in fact, i don't understand why the bluebook doesn't cost MORE considering the bluebook has the alternatives over a barrel becuase they were the entrenched favorite
It's more than enough training to have to learn the arbitrary and irrational laws of the real world. We don't need to further burden law students with Bluebook. Indeed, time spent learning the Bluebook is time that could be better spent learning real law.
as a 1L-we were subject to a open bluebook citation and research quiz-which i failed-despite answering "all" the questions correctly-i somehow didn't get ahold of the last two pages and failed becuase they were left blank.
Even if it is logical (which I doubt), that doesn't mean that it's necessary.
alternatives (such as the only mildly recognized maroon book Ilya speaks of) might in fact be slightly better-but the cost of switching at this point is too high.
Actually, the cost of switching is very low relative to the benefits. The cost is merely some time and annoyance for law journal editors the year of the switch. The benefits include thousands of man hours of time saved each year on into the indefinite future. And for those who haven't learned the Bluebook yet, the cost of switching is zero.
are you sure-the vast majority of people who use bluebook citation already are extremely familiar with its system and don't have to look up much-except possibly check each year for changes.
but a switch turns everyone into a 1L
Even if they don't have to look up anything at all, a lot of time is still spent going over each and every footnote to make sure that it conforms to all the rules, and making changes where it doesn't. Moreover, not everyone who works on a law journal knows all the rules really well. A lot of us learned the system just well enough to get on the journal.
As for everyone becoming a 1L, the effect would be limited to the year of the transition. After that time, we would save thousands of hours every year on 1) teaching the system to new people, and 2) checking and changing citations.
Even if the publishers decided to "abolish" the blue book, would that necessarily make a difference. They didn't "adopt" the thing in the first place. For that, the blame lies elsewhere. The ones who adopted the Blue Book can still cling to any of the existing editions, no matter what the editors of the YLJ think.
Also, why is this not an area where the market should decide?
ok i guess i could see that
but then it would seem the real problem is not the bluebook itself-but incredibly nitpicking journal editors=thats a more systemic problem i would think.
In my managing editor days, I hated the Bluebook because while it offered more rules than the Internal Revenue Code (nice analogy, Prof. Solove!), it didn't address such things as internet citations (at the time) and was difficult to deal with.
So, I think my experience suggests I'd join you, Ilya, in urging the "repeal" of the Bluebook in favor of something simple and straightforward!
But it isn't going anywhere anytime soon. So I just ask one thing. One small favor to make everyone's lives a little easier. FEWER TYPESETTINGS. For the love of God, just because word processing programs have italics, underline, small caps, ALL CAPS, bold, and whatever else they think of net DOES NOT MEAN WE HAVE TO USE THEM. Everything you want to do with different typesettings can be done with regular font, underline, and italics. Everything you actually need to do can be done with regular font and either underline or italics.
If anyone here has any influence on the revision, please use it to achieve this one, small goal. I'll even settle for getting rid of small caps, which looks good on headings but is a pain in the ass to use for citations.
Don't buy the BlueBook, just go here:
Introduction to Basic Legal Citation
But surely a more efficient method would be to teach complex rule systems directly, in classes designed for that purpose. That would free up the citation system to do what it is supposed to do -- cite things.
I feel like there's an actual economics term for this circumstance, but damned if I can recall it. Where a justification for a result is trumped by showing a more efficient, externality-free method. Second best result? Something like that?
As such, the man-hours The Bluebook eliminates are the man-hours spent debating and trying to figure out how to clearly cite some proposition. What Alabama statutory compilation should I cite? How should I cite the Bundesverwaltungsgericht? What sorts of punctuation should I use in a cite? And so on. It's natural -- and completely professional -- for editors of law reviews and journals to want final answers for these questions which can be applied by multiple editors working concurrently. If The Bluebook didn't exist, at some point they'd have to ask these question and come to some sort of answer, in the process developing their own style manual. The Bluebook reduces that effort to simply looking a rule up. The Bluebook is a massive time-saver, not a time-sink.
Is The Bluebook inferior to a "simpler" system of citation like the Maroon Book? If the simpler systems simply impose back upon law review boards the task of developing uniform standards for situations not addressed by the style manual, then the answer is no. The argument against The Bluebook, then, reduces to an argument about editorial uniformity and its value. It might be said that, as long as a citation is necessary and clear, it is sufficient; it makes little difference if one article abbreviates "Georgetown" as "Geo." and another leaves it untouched. Further effort towards "uniformity" is wasted effort.
If all anyone cited were law review articles and major reporters, an intuitive "clarity norm" might be workable. But beyond the realm of the familiar, there is a universe of materials that authors cite for which no clarity norm is intuitively obvious. Citing even state statutory compilations -- to say nothing of internet or international sources -- can be tricky without some kind of guide. What year and edition does one cite? For the purpose of a given article, it may make little difference whether one of three editions published containing a particular amendment is used, but which would be best in terms of conveying to readers the appropriate information? The most recent? The most contemporaneous? How does one decide?
The suggestion to disavow The Bluebook and the comprehensive uniformity it enables just means that law review boards are going to be stuck with different kinds of questions that are going to occupy their time. It might eliminate some man-hours in terms of conforming citations to familiar sources, but it will increase man-hours devoted to determining whether a particular cite is "clear" enough for readers to be able to find the information they're looking for. Eventually, boards are just going to develop their own "clarity" guides, which will be de facto style guides, since every cite will at least have to conform to the standards of clarity developed therein.
The Bluebook is involved. It contains many rules. Mastery of the guide may be time better spent poring over legal scholarship or getting a tan, but the guide saves a great deal of time that would otherwise be spent developing journal-specific rules, either of "style," "uniformity," or "clarity." The Bluebook articulates a single language upon which we may all rely. It should be retained.
Seems like a great racket -- have professionals in the field contribute for free, then keep all the funds raised.
Either I'm not OCD enough for the Bluebook (remote possibility), or it is a completely asinine system of citation. I've used the index and gone to what appears to be the relevant rule, only to find that there is some other rule, somewhere else in the tome, that applies.
Please tell me I'm not the only one who has omitted small sections of research papers, simply to avoid Bluebooking the relevant citations....
Maybe we could keep the Bluebook and care less if italicization is done through the period or not. No one reads the footnotes /that/ carefully, we keep the "definitive" source, and abolish the manhours spent Bluebooking to precision.
There is Type I (caring too much about accuracy in cites) and Type II (caring too little about accuracy in cites). Law reviews commit a lot of Type I error in an effort to avoid Type II.
I have to say the racket are all these approximately $100 casebooks (that you law professors author) that change editions every year or so when a cheap free-standing supplement can certainly do the trick. One reason we see new editions is to prevent students and others from reselling casebooks on Amazon or Half.com. It is horrible how casebook publishers and authors are gouging students by publishing new editions prematurely.
In any event, the Bluebook should do away with the distinction between law review footnotes and court documents/legal memoranda for citations. These typeface conventions are confusing and stupid. If you don't know what I mean, look at the inside front cover and back cover of the Bluebook.
The Bluebook should also give better examples. Look at the second example for Rule 12.4(a) - Session Laws on page 106 of the 18th edition of the Bluebook. It provides this example for citing session laws:
Health Professions Education Extension Amendments of 1992, Pub. L. No. 102-408, 106 Stat. 1992.
The year of the act is 1992 and if that is part of the popular name then it is included as part of the popular name rather than at the end in a parenthetical. The second 1992 is actually the page number of the Statutes at Large citation. This citation is technically correct but it is a terrible example to include because it leads to confusion. How hard is it to find a public law that doesn't have the same number for the date and the Statutes at Large page number?
I also think the difference between Rule 10.2.1 and Rule 10.2.2 is silly. Why not just abbreviate everything in the case name and not worry about whether the case name is in a textual sentence or the case name is in a freestanding citation? This is needlessly confusing for students to learn.
Rule 15.8(a) is extremely unhelpful because it gives just examples but not the rules for citing a legal dictionary or a legal encyclopedia. Would it kill them to put the rule for citing a legal encyclopedia?
I think I've done the same thing, too. If it's a small section - say, a few sentences - and I get really frustrated, I might just hit "delete" on those few sentences and call it a day. It usually depends on how much the professor cares about proper Bluebooking (as opposed to, say, consistent citation formats, whatever it may be, or some citation format that allows the reader to find the cited text with minimal effort).
However, my big problem was actually with the law reviews themselves. There are a bunch of bluebook rules that are considered recommended and not mandatory. The first thing my law review did in its citation manual is make them all mandatory, which resulted in things like totally unnecessary parentheticals.
Sounds like RICO.
But who cares, isn't BlueBooking what RA's are for?
I find citation methods such a [cite-number] with all the citations grouped into end notes far more readable, which was true even before I went blind. They simply interfere less with the stream of actual writing, as opposed to the references.
The highly abbreviated nature of legal citations also fails to help in this regard.