Frequently Asked Questions
Regarding Citation
Who
determines “correct” citation?
There is no national citation authority. Though various citation
manuals purport to prescribe “rules” governing citation practice, for most
legal writing citation rules are established by conventional practice.[1]
The Bluebook, formally known as A
Uniform System of Citation, was for many years the most widely used
compilation of citation rules. Currently in its 18th edition
(the first was published in 1926), the Bluebook is produced by the
student editors of the
The ALWD Citation Manual: A Professional System of Citation
(the “ALWD Citation Manual”), published in its first edition in 2000
(and in its third in 2006), has quickly gained a wide following in U.S. law
schools, having been adopted by more than half of the U.S. first-year legal
writing programs. The
book was designed as a “Restatement” of current citation practices. Given
the enormous influence the Bluebook has had on current citation
practices, therefore, the citations prescribed by the ALWD Citation Manual
hardly differ from those prescribed by the Bluebook.
The ALWD Citation Manual is primarily the work of Darby Dickerson, Dean
of Stetson Law School and the nation’s leading authority on legal citation,
with significant contributions from many members of the Association of Legal
Writing Directors (“ALWD”), a nationwide organization of professional legal
writing professors. Most of the Legal
Analysis & Writing professors at Case are members of ALWD, but, it should
go without saying, they have no stake whatsoever in the success of the ALWD Citation Manual.
An earlier project, The University of Chicago Manual of Legal
Citation, which called itself the Maroon Book, was an effort to
prescribe concisely abstract rules of citation that would be universally
applicable. The Maroon Book, first published in 1989, is now out of
print and never enjoyed much success.
More often than not, local court rules supplement or override the
rules set forth in citation manuals. Typically, such local rules are
consistent with the Bluebook and the ALWD Citation Manual but set
out requirements for greater specificity. Thus, for example, some state
rules require parallel citations where the manuals would not. Only very
few of these local rules call for radically different citation formats.
While these local rules expressly only apply to documents submitted to courts,
those requirements inevitably exercise some influence on wider citation
practice within the jurisdictions where they apply.
Commercial legal publishers employ their own citation forms
primarily, of course, to reinforce their own commercial interests. Thus,
for example, a judge’s citation to "Butner
v. United States, 440 U.S. 48, 55 (1979)," when reported in West
Group's National Reporter System becomes "Butner
v. United States, 440 U.S. 48, 55, 99 S.Ct. 914,
59 L.E.2d 136 (1979)." Annotations in a West Group annotated code
systematically place that company's National Reporter System citation for a
case ahead of its volume and page number in the official state reporter.
Annotations and summaries in Matthew Bender's Lawyers' Edition of Supreme Court
decisions cite to the same publisher's United States Code Service – e.g.,
"15 USCS § 637(d)".
In the end, most of "legal citation," like most of any
language, is a matter of convention established by evolving usage by the
members of distinct professional communities.
Why did we choose primarily to
teach the ALWD Citation Manual rather than the Bluebook in CaseArc?
We chose to use the ALWD Citation Manual
rather than the Bluebook in CaseArc
because, in short, it is a better tool with which to teach and to learn
citation and because it more accurately reflects actual practitioner citation
practice than does the Bluebook: (1) it is better organized than the Bluebook
and therefore an easier means of learning the general conventions of existing
citation practice, and (2) the jurisdiction-specific appendices set forth in
the ALWD Citation Manual reflect more accurately local practice than do
the appendices of the Bluebook. The Bluebook’s organization has
suffered in part because it is the product of student editors, the
editorial staffs of student editors constantly turn over, and because the
changes made over the course of the Bluebook’s 18 editions have been
made through a process of accretion – never has the Bluebook been reorganized
and rewritten from the ground up. The ALWD Citation Manual was
prepared in part as a response to the frequent and puzzling changes in the Bluebook
and the difficulty legal writing professors encountered in teaching first-year
law students citation skills from the Bluebook. In addition
to being poorly organized, much of the Bluebook is devoted to citation
for law review articles and notes, which it treats in a wholly different way
than “practitioner” form. In CaseArc, we
teach only practitioner form and would do so even if, as we did before 2000, we
still taught the Bluebook. Most of the examples of citation in the
Bluebook, and the rare explanations of the rules, were prepared for
journal editors working on article footnotes; the Bluebook was not
prepared for lawyers and judges preparing documents for law practice and
court. In CASEArc, we teach legal
citation for practitioners because we are teaching legal citation in the
context of drafting legal memoranda and appellate briefs. The ALWD
Citation Manual is a system of legal citation for practitioners.
Thus, it is a better citation system for our purposes and your learning in CaseArc.
While an attorney plainly has to follow
certain standards in his or her citation practice, there is no authority
governing those standards (other than the specific court to which the attorney
is submitting some of his or her documents), so those standards shift over
time, region, and even individual practitioner. Given the absence of
uniformity in citation practices, the fact the ALWD Citation Manual is better written, better organized, and
better laid out graphically than the Bluebook
make it a better tool even as one textbook might be better than another.
That is in no small part what a law school citation manual is—a textbook.
Students come to law school either without any idea about citation form or with
exposure only to other, very different, citation forms (e.g., MLA or APA form, both of
which are enforced by central authorities, the Modern Language Association and
the American Psychological Association, respectively). In CaseArc’s introduction
to citation, we teach very basic matters, including what parties’ names need to
go in the citation, what reporters are, which reporters to cite and when, the
relevance of state and local rules governing citation, the purposes of citation
(one of the major and more unappreciated differences between practice and
journal form), and where to look for the conventions within the legal community
in which one practices (which can be defined at the state, local, and even firm
levels). Beyond those basic matters, teaching citation is largely a
matter of the students then conforming with professional accuracy to the
required standard. Once students learn those basic matters, they ought to
be able to conform to any standard that actually exists within the
What are the differences?
The citations resulting from
the use of the rules prescribed by the ALWD
Citation Manual and the Bluebook
are so minor they likely would not even be noticed by the vast majority of
practicing lawyers. Those differences (for practitioner citation) are set
forth in a table (in pdf format) available online.[2]
It would be very, very difficult to figure out which citation manual’s rules
had been used by the author of any legal document; in fact, it is far more
likely that anyone who spots differences between citations produced using the Bluebook and the ALWD Citation Manual
in practice is relying more on an old version of the Bluebook, dating
back to the time of that lawyer’s law school days, than from any difference
between the ALWD Citation Manual and the latest iteration of the Bluebook.
In fact, the rules prescribed by the ALWD Citation Manual are more
consistent with what generations of lawyers actually do than what the Bluebook
recommends. More importantly, the ALWD Citation Manual’s
jurisdiction-specific appendices are far more accurate in their reflection of
those jurisdictions’ local practices than the Bluebook’s.
What should I say if an employer
asks me if I know how to “bluebook”?
If you are asked at work or in a job
interview whether you know how to "bluebook" correctly, you are most
likely not being asked whether you know the Bluebook; instead, the
questioner is probably asking whether you know how to correctly cite to legal
materials and can check the cites in the document for accuracy and
veracity. In short, the term “bluebook” has become a generic term much as
other trademark terms such as “xerox,” “band-aid,” “kleenex,” and “q-tip” have become generic. If you
were asked to “xerox” something, you would photocopy
it, and not worry about whether the machine you use was made by Ricoh, Canon,
Minolta, or Xerox.
Moreover, correct legal citation is based on
putting citations into formats acceptable to most practitioners and judges, and
you can do that regardless of whether you originally learned legal citation
from the ALWD Citation Manual, the Bluebook, or some other
source. In practice, of course, for documents submitted to a court, you
must consult the local citation rules for the jurisdiction. Among other
advantages of the ALWD Citation Manual is the fact that its appendices
include these local rules. The Bluebook
does not.
While even some practitioners will wonder
why we aren’t “teaching the Bluebook,”
in doing so they are expressing the misunderstandings of citation form
discussed in this FAQ. The Bluebook
has only perpetuated these misunderstandings, not least in its misnomer of a
subtitle, A Uniform System of Citation. Law schools bears their
share of blame in perpetuating these misunderstandings, largely because of the
undue prominence given to citation in law school journals and the prominence of
journal experience in the careers of law school faculty. While most
What do I need to learn in order
to do journal Bluebook editing?
If you work on a journal during
your second and third years of law school, you will need to learn the Bluebook
rules for law journals because the Case journals all still adhere to Bluebook
citation rules. As mentioned above, the need to learn Bluebook
journal citation style is not a new burden created by adoption of the ALWD
Citation Manual; even when in the first year legal writing course we taught
the Bluebook, we only taught Bluebook practitioner
citation. If you already know how to write citations well from the ALWD
Citation Manual, conversion to the Bluebook for journal citation
should be no more difficult than it was when the conversion was from Bluebook
practitioner citation to Bluebook journal citation. Beginning
in 2004, an annual presentation on the major differences between ALWD Citation
Manual style and Bluebook journal style has been made to members of
the journals.
Conceivably, the law journals at Case could adopt the ALWD Citation Manual
to govern their citation practices. Several law school journals have done
so.[3] Nonetheless, law schools and especially law
journals tend to follow the lead of the top-ranked law schools. Thus,
because
We hope you find this information useful as
you venture beyond the law school into the larger legal community. Please
feel free to contact any of the Legal Analysis & Writing professors if you
have any questions about this FAQ.
[1] See generally Peter
W. Martin, Introduction to Basic Legal Citation (LII 2003 ed.), http://www.law.cornell.edu/citation/index.htm
(accessed September 24, 2004).
[2]
If you would like to learn more about the truly minor differences, there are
citation comparison charts available at ALWD Citation Manual website: http://www.alwd.org/cm/.
[3]
http://www.alwd.org/cm/
(accessed September 24, 2004).
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most recently revised on June 29, 2006.