Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Go Back Into the Bluebook: Notes on the Fifteenth Edition

Chicago-Kent Law Review Volume 67 Issue 1 Symposium on the Seventh Circuit as a Article 9 Criminal Court April 1991 Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back Into the Bluebook: Notes on the Fifteenth Edition David E.B. Smith Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cklawreview Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation David E. Smith, Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back Into the Bluebook: Notes on the Fifteenth Edition, 67 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 275 (1991). Available at: https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cklawreview/vol67/iss1/9 This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarly Commons @ IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in Chicago-Kent Law Review by an authorized editor of Scholarly Commons @ IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE TO GO BACK INTO THE BLUEBOOK: NOTES ON THE FIFTEENTH EDITION DAVID E.B. SMITH* The BLUEBOOK' is a necessary evil. 2 Having a standard for legal citation should provide authors and readers with a method of ritualizing the mechanical details of supplying authority in legal scholarship, al- lowing full attention to be focused on the content which the work is at- tempting to communicate. 3 However, when such a standard is altered, confusion and distraction arise as those mechanical matters formerly submerged into the subconscious are evoked once more by unfamiliarity. The promulgation of a new standard such as the 15TH BLUEBOOK forces those who have mastered the obscurities of the old standard to start the bedeviling4 learning process anew. To ease that burden, this essay attempts to help smooth over the transition to 15TH BLUEBOOK style by highlighting some of the significant differences between the old and new versions. Some of the changes in 15TH BLUEBOOK are for the better 5 Some are for the worse. Some 6 serve no apparent purpose. * The author accepts full responsibility, or blame, for the opinions expressed herein. The names of those who provided assistance are withheld to protect the innocent. 1. Compare THE BLUEBOOK: A UNIFORM SYSTEM OF CITATION (15th ed. 1991) [hereinafter 15TH BLUEBOOK] with A UNIFORM SYSTEM OF CITATION (14th ed. 1986) [hereinafter 14TH BLUE- BOOK]. Generically, hereinafter BLUEBOOK. It has been pointed out that the BLUEBOOK does not tell one how to cite itself. See 15TH BLUEBOOK, supra at v ("Bluebook"); W. Duane Benton, Devel- opments in the Law-Legal Citation, 86 YALE L.J. 197, 197 n.1 (1976) ("Twelfth Edition"); Mary I. Coombs, Lowering One's Cites" A (Sort of) Review of the University of Chicago Manual of Legal Citation, 76 VA. L. REV. 1099, 1102 n.16 (1990) ("BLUEBOOK"); Aside, Don't* Cry" Over Filled Milk- The Neglected Footnote Three to Caroline Products', 136 U. PA. L. REV. 1553, 1558 n.23 (1988) ("BLUEBOOK"). Cf DOUGLAS R. HOFSTADTER, METAMAGICAL THEMAS: QUESTING FOR THE ESSENCE OF MIND AND PATTERN 265 (1985) (summarizing G6del's Theorem: no sufficiently complex mathematical system can simultaneously achieve completeness and consistency). 2. Contra Richard A. Posner, Goodbye to the Bluebook, 53 U. CHI. L. REV. 1343, 1343 (1986) (describing the BLUEBOOK as "the mindless elaboration of social practices" of law and comparing it to the pyramids of Egypt). 3. See Posner, supra note 2, at 1344. 4. Cf. United States ex rel. Mayo v. Satan & His Staff, 54 F.R.D. 282 (W.D. Pa. 1971) (deny- ing motion to proceed in forma pauperis on grounds of lack of personal jurisdiction over defendant and plaintiff's failure to provide directions for service of process). 5. 15TH BLUEBOOK finally allows us to cite ourselves as CHI.-KENT L. REV., instead of the ridiculous 14TH BLUEBOOK CHI.[-]KENT L. REV.. 6. Some would argue that much of the BLUEBOOK serves no purpose. See Arthur D. Austin, Footnote' Skulduggery" and Other Bad Habits', 44 U. MIAMI L. REV. 1009, 1025 (1990) ("puritan- ical handcuffs of the Bluebook"); Arthur D. Austin, Footnotes as Product Differentiation, 40 VAND. 275 CHICAGO-KENT LAW REVIEW [Vol. 67:275 Broadly speaking, the overall structure of the work is better. The tables of abbreviations are collected in the back of the volume, rather than being scattered throughout. The BLUEBOOK editors have apparently realized that there are lawyers out there writing briefs and motions for real courts, and so 15TH BLUEBOOK contains "practitioner's notes" to cover situations not adequately served by law review citation style. 15TH BLUEBOOK also specifies short citation forms for nearly everything, elim- inating one of the few places where writers were left to their own devices by 14TH BLUEBOOK. This essay seeks only to highlight the significant changes of sub- stance in 15TH BLUEBOOK. Thus, details of the new practitioner's rules or short citation forms are left for the reader to discover.7 As an exer- cise", the footnotes herein (which may or may not have anything to do with the BLUEBOOK) are in 15TH BLUEBOOK style, to provide a few more examples (and somewhat less boring ones) than the BLUEBOOK itself does. I. AUTHOR'S NAMES The most substantial changes in 15TH BLUEBOOK affect the citation of author's names. In an area which has engendered 9 considerable con- L. REV. 1131, 1140 & n.41 (1987) ("nit-picking" and "formalistic") [hereinafter Austin, Footnotes as Product Differentation]; Benton, supra note 1, at 197 (reviewing A UNIFORM SYSTEM OF CITATION (12th ed. 1976)) ("Twelve joins Amy Vanderbilt, the Rules of Baseball, and totalitarian regimes throughout history in a modest quest to impose uniformity on more mundane spheres of human activity."); James D. Gordon III, How Not to Succeed in Law School, 100 YALE L.J. 1679, 1692 (1991) ("idiot rules"); Posner, supra note 2, at 1344 ("Form is prescribed for the sake of form, not of function; a large structure is built up, all unconsciously, by accretion; the superficial dominates the substantive."); id. at 1347 ("unhealthy preoccupation with uniformity"). For a contrast with the Rules of Baseball, see Aside, The Common Law Origins of the Infield Fly Rule, 123 U. PA. L. REV. 1474 (1975). For a discussion of exceptions to rules, see Robert J. Martineau, ConsideringNew Issues on Appeal: The General Rule and the Gorilla Rule, 40 VAND. L. REV. 1023, 1057 n.137 (1987). 7. The sections on foreign and international materials are also ignored herein. Being faced with the prospect of having to determine which British monarch reigned in the year of a court's decision, or whether a case should be cited to R6d6 Kankei Minji Saibanreishfl or Gy6sei Saiban Gepp6, would be enough to make the most stout-hearted Bluebooker tremble. To deal with it volun- tarily would be ludicrous. There are limits, after all. But see E. Joshua Rosenkranz, Law Review's Empire, 39 HASTINGS L.J. 859, 893 n.104 (1988) (unflattering description of law review types). 8. This piece started out as a short memo for the author's fellow law review staffers and grew out of control. The author expressly disavows deriving any enjoyment out of wading through the morass of the BLUEBOOK; nevertheless, just like spending a half-hour on the Stairmaster at the health club, one must do it for one's own good. 9. See Katharine T. Bartlett, Feminist Legal Methods, 103 HARV. L. REV. 829, 829 n.* (1990): I had wanted to humanize and particularize the authors whose ideas I used in this Article by giving their first as well as last names. Unfortunately, the editors of the HARVARD LAW REVIEW, who otherwise have been most cooperative, insisted upon adhering to the "time- honored" Bluebook convention of using last names only, see A UNIFORM SYSTEM OF CI- TATION 91 (14th ed. 1986), except when the writing is a "book," in which case the first 1991] NOTES ON THE BLUEBOOK troversy, the BLUEBOOK editors have retreated from their formerly ada- mant position' ° of citing only last names for articles, or first initials and last names for books, to adopt a more liberal position of citing the author's full name for all sources.II II. AUTHOR'S FULL NAME REQUIRED First, the author's full name is to be supplied in full, whether citing books (rule 15.1.1) or periodicals (rule 16). Thus, the 14TH BLUEBOOK cite C. MACKINNON, THE SEXUAL HARASSMENT OF WORKING WOMEN 57 (1979). should now appear as CATHERINE A. MACKINNON, THE SEXUAL HARASSMENT OF WORK- ING WOMEN 57 (1979). 12 Similarly for periodicals, the former Sirico, Supreme Court Haiku, 61 N.Y.U. L. REV. 1224 (1986). should now appear as Louis J. Sirico, Supreme Court Haiku, 61 N.Y.U. L. REV. 1224 (1986). Unfortunately, the 15TH BLUEBOOK editors couldn't leave well enough alone and write a simple rule such as MAROON BOOK'S "Cite to the author's or editor's full name as given on the first page or the title initial is given, id. at 83, and except when the writing is by a student, in which case no name whatsoever is given (unless the student has a name like "Bruce Ackerman," in which case "it may be indicated parenthetically," id. at 91), see id. In these rules, I see hierarchy, rigidity, and depersonalization, of the not altogether neutral variety. First names have been one dignified way in which women could distinguish themselves from their fathers and their husbands. I apologize to the authors whose identities have been obscured in the apparently higher goals of Bluebook orthodoxy.

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