Posted Friday, February 18th, 2011 by Anthony Kammer
Blacklist the Bluebook
The Bluebook would be a great topic for students of memetics. How did this universally despised, recondite, and laborious system of citation become so deeply embedded in the practices of legal journals? The whole point of citations is to 1) support what’s in the text; and 2) make references easily identifiable and retrievable. But under the Bluebook’s influence, law reviews are awkward at the first and terrible at the second.
This practice of over-citation grows out a general lawyerly tendency to act as though truth comes from citing authorities—sometimes forgetting, it seems, that it’s possible to find an authority for all kinds of ridiculous positions. At other times, the practice of citation seems to be mistaken for an end in itself. In her excellent article Originality, Jeannie Suk makes the following observation: ”law reviews give citations for everything under the sun, as if every proposition, and some things that are not propositional at all, needed ‘authority.’ The mere mention of Homer’s Odyssey or Shakespeare’s Hamlet would include citations.” She then proceeds to illustrate the point with the citation: “[FN107]. Homer, The Odyssey; William Shakespeare, Hamlet.”
And in terms of producing citations that make sources identifiable and retrievable, the Bluebook is cryptic and unintuitive. It does worse than the citation formats used in other professions. In effect, the book’s creators have invented a code language that only someone else with a Bluebook can decipher. Richard Posner, another of the Bluebook’s most vocal opponents, first took on the Bluebook in the 1980s and has published a follow-up article, The Bluebook Blues, in the Jan. 2011 issue of the Yale Law Journal (pdf here). He makes the point quite effectively:
An example that I have picked literally at random is “C.Ag.” What does “C.Ag.” stand for? Why, of course, the Código de Águas of Brazil. Now suppose one had occasion to cite the Código de Águas. Why would one want to abbreviate it? The abbreviation would be meaningless to someone who was not a Brazilian lawyer, and perhaps to Brazilian lawyers as well (but do they abbreviate Código de Águas “C.Ag”?). The basic rule of abbreviating, ignored by the authors of The Bluebook, is to avoid nonobvious abbreviations: don’t make the reader puzzle over an abbreviation, as The Bluebook does routinely. Consider “Temp. Envtl. L. & Tech. J.,” “ILSA J. Int’l & Comp. L.,” “Emp. Rts. & Emp. Pol’y J.,” and “AIPLA Q.J.” These are names of journals. Now try figuring out “B.T.A.M. (P-H),” “A. Ct. Crim. App.,” “A.F. Ct. Crim. App.,” “C.G. Ct. Crim. App.,” “N-M Ct. Crim. App.,” “Ne. Reg’l Parole Comm’n,” and “Cent. Ill. Pub. Serv. Co.”
What is the point? It’s as if there were a heavy tax on letters, making it costly to write out Coast Guard Court of Criminal Appeals instead of abbreviating it “C.G. Ct. Crim. App.”
Besides being bad, the Bluebook is an odd sociological phenomenon and a window into much of what is wrong with law school and law practice. I agree wholeheartedly with Posner’s comparison of the Bluebook to hypertrophy—”a class of diseases in which an organ grows to an abnormal size because of the uncontrolled growth of the cells that constitute it.”
The Bluebook seems to persist (and to grow with every new edition) not out of utility, but out of a competitive and obsequious law student subculture and a self-imposed sense of what employers want. To build on arguments from Duncan Kennedy’s excellent Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy, this citation culture reinforces class divides and existing hierarchies by 1) making it harder for non-lawyers to read legal publications; 2) perpetuating a system where law students do citations rather than the authors of the articles; and 3) perpetuating another senseless sorting mechanism for law students who want to suck up to employers.
And on top of that, it wastes a lot of time that could be better spent on other things.
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Agreed, with one reservation. I think a standardized citation format of SOME kind is helpful for effective digital cataloging. For example, when I read a case in Westlaw, nearly every citation to another case is a link. That would be harder to do with inconsistent citations. And this sort of digital manipulation of legal materials is critical now and will only become more so.
I agree that some sort of citation system is necessary. There are obvious advantages to consistency within an article and maybe even cross-article (or cross-disciplinary) consistency as well. But the Bluebook abbreviation charts, the arbitrary rules about capitalization, etc. make it a poor contender. [I would add that one advantage the Bluebook has over many other citation forms is the pin cite--it's incredibly helpful for the reader to know what pages in the source material are relevant].
Arguably, however, digital cataloging should enable greater flexibility rather than less. With the internet, the need to have precise spacing and punctuation (and sometimes even spelling) is far less crucial than in an index. Imagine if Google only gave results when you had every detail perfectly specified. In any case, the act of Bluebooking should be fully automated at this point–any recognizable citation should be able to be converted to the necessary format with a pretty basic piece of software. There is no reason for people to continue wasting time on this the way they do.
Whoever writes a program to automatically create Bluebook citations will make a fortune — but he might die of boredom in the process.
You have a bright future as a writer of wise aphorisms. Or fortune cookies.
Judging from the submittal time, I believe you were addressing my comment. To that, I say thank you, perhaps I’ve missed my calling; I do like fortune cookies.
Actually, I think my comment applies to both of you. Perhaps you could start a company together.
Ha ha, all I ask is that you be clear.
History is often cryptic when compared to our own rationalizations of ease. Culturally, you’d have to live there/then to fully understand its day-to-day life and the common methods. In other words: to read and use the book is difficult at best; but to rewrite it is impossible at worst.
Maybe it’s like the Biblical verse: “I give you life, and I give it abundantly.” No-one ever said it would be easy or that it would not change from time-to-time. And to a ‘study in memetics,’ apples and oranges, me thinks; for that subject regards effectiveness carrying from one to the next, which the article asserts the Bluebook does not… or does it?
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