Ilya Somin at Volokh renews his calls for the death of the Bluebook.  For those who never enjoyed the rigors of law school, the Bluebook is what lawyers call a book entitled “A Uniform System of Citation.”  When I went to law school, it was a little book with a blue cover.  From what I read, it’s gotten larger.  I assume it’s still got a blue cover, though I couldn’t swear to it.

Law students are expected to learn every rule and nuance of the Bluebook.  Law reviews slavishly pour over it, vetting the articles of lawprofs to make sure that they conform to the rules in every respect.  A capital letter here, a period there, makes all the difference.  These are life and death matters for law review editors, and millions of pencil points have been sacrificed to the Bluebook gods.  What a waste of good red  pencils.

But what of the Bluebook to those of us laboring in the trenches?  Here’s the scoop.  We must be able to accurately and adequately communicate our citations to the courts if they are to be able to follow our arguments.  Doing so largely requires us to use relatively standard citation form, which really isn’t a very big deal.  Whether we include a space between “Fed. R. Crim. P.” or not doesn’t tend to create mass confusion.  The judges get the message. 

Once law school fades into distant memory, about 6 hours into our first post-law-school work day, the Bluebook is left in its place of honor on the shelf, never to be looked at again.  Eventually, it is consumed by dust, such that its distinctive blue cover turns a lovely shade of gray.  And there it sits until we die (or worse, retire). 

The Bluebook is probably the biggest non-starter in the law.  Has anybody ever read a Supreme Court decision that included the language:

We might be persuaded that the appellant was correct in his analysis of the caselaw, but because he failed to use a period in his citation form of an obscure law review article, we affirm.

Not me.  In fact, I can’t recall a judge ever mentioning citation form in my papers.  Ever.  This may be because I am a natural Bluebook prodigy, and somehow comply with even the most ridiculously obscure rule without realizing it.  But I don’t think so.  I may be good, but not that good.

No, my sense is that the judges feel pretty much the same as me about the Bluebook.  They don’t care.  As long as the citations can be found, they take no issue.  And you can bet your bottom dollar that they aren’t sweating the Bluebook when the write their opinions.  As if their decision doesn’t count if they mis-cited a case.

So while Ilya, and others like Dan Solove, fight the chains of Bluebook slavery, I’ve got to laugh.  This is what comes of being a lawprof, with that myopia that can come only from dependency on law reviews as proof of existence.  As a right of passage for law students, I find it quaint.  There’s no harm in learning to do things the “right way,” even if nobody really cares.  As a shackle on the bigger ideas of lawprofs, it’s just an arcane yoke that comes with owning specialized territory.

For the rest of us, it’s really pretty funny to hear the lawprofs complain about such nonsense.  Don’t blame the Bluebook (or Yale law review) for being what it is.  If you want to lay blame, how about your fellow lawprofs and deans who have yet to send the memo to the kids on law review that

“Henceforth, Harvard Law Review will no longer use Bluebook citation form. If you can understand the citation, regardless of form, then that’s perfectly acceptable.”

But the truth is, you guys love holding the secret key to getting published in law reviews, and if it was only about good ideas, then anybody could do it.