1Ls Don't Need to Learn how to BlueBook

-- By ShannonFrampton - 24 Feb 2024

Introduction

The BlueBook: A Uniform System of Citation is a style manual that dictates rules of legal citation. Spanning over 500 pages, it lays out rules that govern, among other issues, which source to cite for parallel citations, how to abbreviate party names, whether to place a space between page number and parenthesis, and how and when to underline or italicize punctuation marks. It is considered the gold standard for legal citation.

In this essay I will argue that Columbia Law School should stop teaching The BlueBook to first year students because teaching the Bluebook wastes valuable time and sends damaging messages about what it means to think, act, and write like a lawyer.

The BlueBook is the Worst Type of LawyerTalk

The biggest and most insurmountable issue with the BlueBook is that it is too complicated. A system of legal citation is a form of communication. Citations should communicate two key pieces of information about every cited authority. First, where the reader can go to find the referenced authority. Second, the weight of the cited authority. The ideal system of citation is informative but unintrusive. Ideally, the system of citation should not distract the reader from the argument being made in the text. Citations should be easily understandable by the reader and should be brief enough that they do not distract/ break the flow of the argument. No system of citation requires 500 pages to prescribe rules that achieve the above goals. Judge Richard Posner, an ardent critic of the Bluebook, created and used in his court a style guide based on the first version of the Bluebook that was only two pages long. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/41060153 ).

The Bluebook;s complex rules serve to communicate more about the writer as a person, than they do to inform about the cited authorities, or the arguments or ideas that the writer is espousing. A perfect BlueBook citation is a status symbol. It communicates to the keen reader that the writer is a member of an elite club, that they went to a fancy law school, or that they have the time ( or research assistants or paralegals) to devote to creating perfect citation form.

Teaching the BlueBook Harms Students by Wasting Time

Due to the complexity of the Bluebook, teaching, learning, creating, and critiquing Bluebook citation forms takes a long time. For 1Ls, time is a scarce resource. The time used teaching and editing bluebook forms would be better spent learning/ refining writing and research skills. Writing and Research are marginalized in the 1L curriculum. For most Columbia 1Ls Legal Practice Workshop is the only opportunity that first year student get to develop legal writing, research, and argumentation skills. Importantly, for most 1Ls, it is the only class in which they will receive consistent and individualized feedback on their writing and argumentation. Developing these skills is relegated to a one-credit, pass-fail course taught at in the late evening after students are exhausted from long days of class. Given the scarcity of time available for teaching critical research and writing skills, no time should be wasted mastering Bluebook citation forms.

Some may argue that the Bluebook, though imperfect, remains the dominant citation form. Thus, it is important for students to understand and use. Although Bluebook is the gold standard, it is not universal. Many courts, judges, and journals use their own systems/ rules for citation that differ from the Bluebook to varying degrees. Instead of teaching disembodied Bluebook citation, students drafting briefs and appellate briefs in foundation year moot court classes should be instructed to research and apply the citation forms required for the courts in which their briefs will be “filed.”

Not teaching the Bluebook would not harm student sin any way. Students can learn Bluebook rules if and when they need to. Any mastery of Bluebook rules has a shelf-life of approximately five years because each subsequent edition of the Bluebook tinkers with the rules. Finally, the Bluebook is so complex and so often that students will likely need to relearn the rules and to consult the Bluebook every any time that they are required to use its citation forms.

Teaching the BlueBook Harms Students by Teaching them to Focus on Style over Substance:

Focusing on Bluebook citations sends harmful messages to first year students who often have no prior exposure to legal writing. It encourages students to focus on adhering to arbitrary and ever changing rules. Time spent ensuring the the comma after a case name is italicized, is not wasted time. Time that would not be better spent interviewing a client, researching case law, or refining arguments. It reinforces the fetishization of obsessing over formal rules.

Conclusion

Columbia should stop teaching the Bluebook to first year students is that doing so would be a meaningful first step to abolishing the Bluebook entirely. Columbia is well-positioned to lead the charge against the Bluebook because the Bluebook derives much of its relevance and prestige from its association with the law schools that publish it. If Columbia abandoned the Bluebook other law schools would take notice and the market dominance of the Bluebook would be threatened opening the way for a different, simpler, system to emerge.

I;m a little surprised by the choice of topic, because you are usually a substantively-focused and socially aware lawyer. If the point is to avoid losing time to formal considerations in law school, why devote your time and writing opportunity to a mere formal question?

"Stopping teaching" seems to me an odd formulation: I've been teaching first-year students for 37 years and I have never spent one minute of time in my classroom on citation style. Students in my classes write for the Web, where the use of any citation style at all is subsidiary to good linking practice. If someone sends me writing meant for the page that uses AHA or Chicago or other style for its citations, that's fine with me.

So I think you mean "stopping learning," rather than teaching. I'm not sure why we should ever stop people from learning anything they want to learn, so I assume that the point is that some "legal writing": instructor (who from my point of view is not actually a teacher) has been asking students to provide material with citations in Blue Book form.

This does not actually require anybody to learn the ruleset, however. We should, surely, teach people how to use good research tools. We don't. (Perhaps we'll get around to helping people learn how to research after we destroy the library.) But you can learn even though we don't teach you. You could use Zotero as your research and citation manager. This is wonderful free software that has changed the lives of scholars all over the world in every field of organized learning. It would help you build and share a database of all your readings, manage citations for you, and produce bibliographies and other references in any style. You could abandon foolish "what you see is what you get" document production software like Microbrain Word for a "amrkdown" based system in which your source files are simple text, like this, using simple citation format like [moglen1999, p. 217-219; moglen2003, p. 4n.1] that would than by turned by pandoc, citeproc, L!aTeX and BibTeX into correctly typeset footnotes in Blue Book or any other style.

When I went to law school the best document production software in the world (some of which I had helped to make for IBM) was not capable of producing Blue Book citations correctly because of the complexity you describe. I considered, as I was learning it myself (and as I was ultimately an articles editor on a law journal, I spent hundreds of hours proofreading citations as well as writing them), writing software to automate the citation production. I decided it was too much trouble in 1981, but by the time I came back to law school in 1987 it had been done by others, and was workable (if recondite) software written in a language called OCaml. Almost 40 years later, it's commodity free software, and no one has to learn it anymore. But that, nobody taught you. You and almost all lawyers still use tools that are grossly inadequate. Perhaps that should be the real complaint?

---

You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:

• #Set ALLOWTOPICVIEW = TWikiAdminGroup, ShannonFrampton
• #Set DENYTOPICVIEW = TWikiGuest

Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules for preference declarations. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of these lines. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated ALLOWTOPICVIEW list.