Brigham Young University Law School BYU Law Digital Commons Faculty Scholarship 12-31-2002 Network Effects and Legal Citation: How Antitrust Theory Predicts Who Will Build a Better Bluebook Mousetrap in the Age of Electronic Mice A. Christine Hurt BYU Law School, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Legal Writing and Research Commons Recommended Citation A. Christine Hurt, Network Effects and Legal Citation: How Antitrust Theory Predicts Who Will Build a Better Bluebook Mousetrap in the Age of Electronic Mice, 87 Iᴏᴡᴀ L. Rᴇᴠ. 1257 (2002). This Article is brought to you for free and open access by BYU Law Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of BYU Law Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Network Effects and Legal Citation: How Antitrust Theory Predicts Who Will Build a Better Bluebook Mousetrap in the Age of Electronic Mice ChristineHurt I. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................... 1259 II. THE LEGAL CITATION INDusTRY ......................................................... 1261 A. THE CURRE A M RK .................................................................1261 B. THE UNIORM CJTATION CODE ...................................................... 1262 C. KING?IDIDN'TVOTEFOR YE! ........................................................ 1265 III. THE BLUEBOOK'SACHILES HEEL ...................................................... 1267 A. BLUEBOOKDETRACTORS ................................................................ 1267 B. SIXTEENTH EDTION...................................................................... 1268 C. NEW SEwNTEENTH EDiTION.......................................................... 1271 1. Laudable Changes ............................................................... 1272 2. New Rule 18, Electronic Media and Other Nonprint Resources ............................................................................. 1274 IV. CITATION ALSO-RANS: THE MAROONBOOK ........................................ 1277 A. MAROONBOOKHISTORY ................................................................ 1277 B. CONSUmFR REACTIONS .................................................................. 1279 C. YOu'VEGOTTOHAVERL ......................................................... 1280 D. NETWORKEFmCTSAT WORK ......................................................... 1280 V. THE NEW, NEW THING: THE ALWD MANUAL .................................... 1282 A. ALWD MANUAL HISTORY ............................................................. 1282 *Director of Legal Research and Writing, University of Houston Law Center. The author would like to thank her colleagues at the University of Houston Law Center for their support, particularly Dean Nancy B. Rapoport and Professor Mary Anne Bobinski. The author would like to give special thanks to PaulJ. Stancil of Baker Botts, L.L.P. for his many contributions to this article. Although the author is a member of the Association of Legal Writing Directors, she neither participated in the creation of the ALWD Manual nor benefits from its sale. 1257 1258 87 IOWA LAWREVEW [2002] B. COmPARISON OFAL'WD AD THE SEvENTEENTHEDIToN ................ 1284 1. Form at .................................................................................. 1285 2. Minor, Welcome Improvements ......................................... 1285 3. Minor, Unwelcome Changes ............................................... 1286 4. No Improvement Over the Standard .................................. 1287 VI. UNIVERSAL, VENDOR-NEUTRAL, MEDIUM-NEUTRAL, PUBLIC DOMAIN CITATION ............................................................................. 1290 A. WHAT'S BROKEN? ......................................................................... 1290 B. UNIVERSAL CTA TION HISTORY ...................................................... 1292 C. WHY YOU'RE PROBABLY NOT USING UNIVERSAL CJTATIONPRGHT N ow ............................................................................................ 1295 D. ADOPTION OFTHE UNIVERSAL CITATION PLATFORM ........................ 1297 VII. WHO WILL INHERIT CITATION? .......................................................... 1298 A. THE HAND THATROCKS THE CRADLE ............................................ 1299 B. THE REAL WORLD ......................................................................... 1300 VIII. CONCLUSION ...................................................................................... 1300 NETWORKEFFECTS AND LEGAL CITATION 1259 I. INTRODUCTION Depending on your scientific bent, the year 2000 was either the final year of an era or the dawn of a new millennium. For some legal writers, the year 2000 was definitely a landmark year for legal citation. Within months of one another, the Seventeenth Edition of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation' (the "Bluebook") and the inaugural edition of the ALWD Citation Manual: A Professional System of Citation (the "ALWD Manual") were published. The (current) penultimate edition of the Bluebook, the Sixteenth Edition,3 incited greater than usual criticism. 4 Perhaps for this reason, the Seventeenth Edition was published a year earlier than its scheduled revision.5 Or, perhaps the editors of the Seventeenth Edition felt the hot breath of the ALWD Manual on their necks. Or, maybe sales were down, and the HarvardLaw Review needed a new sofa. 7 For whatever reason, legal writers now have the opportunity to ask and answer the question: Who will inherit citation? The legal community has the option to upgrade the old Bluebook for a new version, to convert to a new upstart citation manual, or perhaps to take this opportunity to rethink how the legal profession moved down this tortuous citation road in the first place. The current technological climate has given rise to a new antitrust model that proves useful for predicting the future of the legal citation industry: the theory of network effects.8 Using this new antitrust theory, the 1. THE BLUEBOOK: A UNIFORM SYSTEM OF CITATION (Columbia Law Review Ass'n et al. eds., 17th ed. 1st prtg. 2000) [hereinafter SEVENTEENTH EDITION]. This edition of the Bluebook is the first to give instruction on how to cite to itself. See A. Darby Dickerson, An Un-Uniform System of Citation: Surviving with the New Bluebook 26 STETsON L. REV. 53, 103 (1996) (suggesting that the Bluebook give an example of how to cite itself). 2. Ass'N OF LEGAL WRITING DIPs. & DARBY DIcKERsoN, ALWD CITATION MANUAL: A PROFESSIONAL SYSTEM OF CITATION (Aspen L. & Bus. Ist prtg. 2000) [hereinafter ALWD MANUAL]. 3. THE BLUEBOOK: A UNIFORM SYSTEi OF CITATION (Columbia Law Review Ass'n et al. eds., 16th ed. 5th prtg. 1996) [hereinafter SIXTEENTH EDITION]. 4. See Thomas R. Haggard, Basic CitationForm, Part1, 9 S.C. LAw. 13, 13 (1998) (declaring that with the Sixteenth Edition, "the time has come for the profession to reclaim its own authority over citation form" from the "bare initiates in the High Calling of the Law"). 5. See C. Edwvard Good, Will the Bluebook Sing the Blues?, TRIAL, Jan. 2001, at 78 (noting that the purpose behind the early timing of the Seventeenth Edition may have been to "correct some of the mistakes made in the 16th edition"). 6. See id. (noting that the authors of the Bluebook may have published the Seventeenth Edition one year early due to their knowledge of the timing of the ALWD Manual publication). 7. SeeJim C. Chen, Something Ok, Something New, SomethingBorrowed, Something Blue, 58 U. CHI. L. REV. 1527, 1530 (1991) (divulging, as a former executive editor of the Harvard Law Review, that the impetus for new editions of the Bluebook has historically been poor sales figures for the aging edition). 8. See United States v. Microsoft Corp., 253 F.3d 34, 83 (D.C. Cir. 2001) (acknowledging the theory of "network effects," but not accepting the argument that the dynamic itself, absent other action or evidence, supports a claim of an antitrust violation). 1260 87 IOWA LAWREVIEW [2002] legal citation industry can be characterized as a network industry, and the dynamic that has kept the Bluebook on the throne for so long is the "network effect" of that industry. In layman's terms, a network effect exists when the value of a product to a user increases with each new user of that product. 9 In network industries, one firm, usually the first one on the market with a product, can quickly and easily become the dominant firm.'0 In the legal citation industry, the Bluebook is the dominant product. Once this dominance is established, any would-be challenger in a network industry will have significantly high barriers to entry," as evidenced by the ephemeral glory of the Maroonbook.1 2 Interestingly, the authors and the publisher of the ALWD Manual, consciously or unconsciously, have taken the exact steps required in a network market to challenge the dominant product successfully. Although network effects alarmists tend to argue that even substantially superior products cannot gain market entry once a product has achieved the market dominance of the Bluebook, a clever upstart can emerge if the product is innovative, yet similar enough to the dominant product. The ALWD Manual is the quintessential interoperable competitor. This newcomer has a high probability of dethroning the resident monopolist. So much has been written about the necessary and unnecessary evils of the Bluebook that