Here's a pop quiz: what's wrong with this legal citation?
See Electronic Enterprises Co., Inc. v. Davenport, 457 F. 2d 997 (N.D.Cal.1972).
Well everyone
knows its supposed to be:
See Elec. Enters. Co. v. Davenport, 457 F.2d 997 (N.D. Cal. 1972).
DUHH...
[---]
So today I had to go to a Bluebook training session for the
Berkeley Technology Law Journal (BTLJ), of which I am a part. The session lasted for two hours and it_was_excruciating. Let me tell you a little something about the Bluebook.
This is a Bluebook:
As you can see, it's in its eighteenth iteration.
The Bluebook is this little guide created and refined by a group of anally-retentive law students and other scholars over the course of the last 50 or so years. Within this dense little piece of work are guidelines to to properly and uniformly citing or abbreviating pretty much anything you would want to cite or abbreviate when working on things like legal memos and law journals.
There are 415 pages in this edition, and they cover every possible instance of well,
anything. Take for example the almost 200 pages of tables and reference charts that tell you how to properly cite and abbreviate every law journal, statute, treaty, court, and periodical
in existence. After looking through this, I had only two words to say:
holy poop.
In order to ensure that people looking at a citation in a law review or a legal memo don't have anally-induced shit-fits, The Bluebook is very precise about where and when to place periods, italics, underlines, and even spaces, to ensure that all citations look the same wherever you see them.
Some examples of Bluebook uber-anality:
- Never begin a quotation with an ellipsis. If using an ellipsis at the beginning or end of a quotation, use four periods with each separated by a space. If using an elipsis in the middle of a sentence, use three periods separated by spaces, unless there are more than two sentences being quoted at which point you use four periods.
- When making parenthetical notes, begin it with a present participle and do not place a period inside the parentheses, unless it is a sentence quote, at which point you put the period inside the parentheses and outside the parentheses, unless the quote is more than 49 words long, at which point it cannot be a parenthetical and must instead be a separate block quote.
- Use "Id." in place of a full citation when referring to the citation immediately preceding it. The period at the end of Id. must be italicised. Use supra instead of Id. when referring to previous cites not immediately preceding. Supra is not acceptable in legal memos; they can only be used in legal publications.
- When using the phrase "see, e.g.," the first, but not the second comma is italicised.
- When citing cases, place a period but no space after abbreviations with single letters and numericals, but place a period and a space after abbreviations with more than one character.
This is just a taste of the anality contained within this tome. Imagine rules like these going on for about 415 pages, and you have an idea of what I have to deal with when I start cite-checking and proofreading articles for the journal.
I foresee myself hating The Bluebook very much, and it's a shame because it's a really nice shade of blue...
