Bluebook

The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, a style guide, prescribes the most widely used legal citation system in the United States. The Bluebook is compiled by the Harvard Law Review Association, the Columbia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal. Currently, it is in its 20th edition. It is so named because its cover is blue.The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation exemplifies hypertrophy in the anthropological sense. It is a monstrous growth, remote from the functional need for legal citation forms, that serves obscure needs of the legal culture and its student subculture.e believe that BabyBlue may include content identical or substantially similar to content or other aspects of The Bluebook that constitute original works of authorship protected by copyright, and which are covered by various United States copyright registrations. . . .The intellectual property claims that the HLR Association made may or may not be spurious. But independent of that, the tactics employed by the HLR Association’s counsel in dealing with Mr. Malamud and Prof. Sprigman are deplorable. The Harvard Law Review claims to be an organization that promotes knowledge and access to legal scholarship. It is a venerated part of the traditions of Harvard Law School. But these actions by the Harvard Law Review speak of competition and not of justice.Bluebook 1 (1926) has approximately 30 sentences in common with Yale Law Journal ’s Abbreviations and Form of Citation (1921), as well as many of the sample citations, all of the proofreading signs, and virtually all of the items in the long list of abbreviations. They both begin with the same sentence: “This pamphlet does not pretend to include a complete list of abbreviations or all the necessary data as to form.” The subtitle of the Bluebook is “Abbreviations and Form of Citation.” The Jones v. Smith Connecticut citation that is the basic case citation example used by the Yale precursors back to Llewellyn-Field is the basic case example used in Bluebook 1. The Haines Yale Law Journal citation that is the basic periodical citation example used by the Yale precursors back to Llewellyn-Field is the basic periodical example used in Bluebook 1. Most of the section on treatises is identical between 1921 and 1926. The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, a style guide, prescribes the most widely used legal citation system in the United States. The Bluebook is compiled by the Harvard Law Review Association, the Columbia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal. Currently, it is in its 20th edition. It is so named because its cover is blue. The Bluebook is taught and used at a majority of U.S. law schools, and is also used in a majority of U.S. federal courts. Alternative legal citation style guides exist, including the Maroonbook and the ALWD Citation Manual. There are also several 'house' citation styles used by legal publishers in their works. The U.S. Supreme Court uses its own unique citation style in its opinions, even though most of the justices and their law clerks obtained their legal education at law schools that use The Bluebook. Furthermore, many state courts have their own citation rules that take precedence over The Bluebook for documents filed with those courts. Some of the local rules are simple modifications to The Bluebook system, such as Maryland's requirement that citations to Maryland cases include a reference to the official Maryland reporter. Delaware's Supreme Court has promulgated rules of citation for unreported cases markedly different from The Bluebook standards, and custom in that state as to the citation format of the Delaware Code also differs from The Bluebook. In other states, notably New York, Texas, and Michigan, the local rules are different from The Bluebook in that they use their own style guides. Attorneys in those states who practice both in federal court and state court must be able to switch seamlessly between citation styles depending upon whether their work product is intended for a federal or state court. Since 2008, California rules of court have allowed citations in Bluebook form as well as the state's own style manual, but many practitioners and courts continue to recommend following the California Style Manual in California courts. An online subscription version of The Bluebook was launched in 2008. A mobile version was launched in 2012 within the rulebook app, an app that allows lawyers, scholars, judges, law students, paralegals, and others involved in the legal profession to reference federal and state court rules, codes, and style manuals on iPad and other mobile devices. The 20th edition of The Bluebook governs the style and formatting of various references and elements of a legal publication, including: According to Harvard, the origin of The Bluebook was a pamphlet for proper citation forms for articles in the Harvard Law Review written by its editor, Erwin Griswold. However, according to a recent study by two Yale librarians, Harvard's claim is incorrect. They trace the origin of The Bluebook to a 1920 publication by Karl N. Llewellyn at Yale on how to write law journal materials for the Yale Law Journal. The authors point out that some of the material in the 1926 first edition of The Bluebook (as well as that in a 1922 Harvard precursor to it published as Instructions for Editorial Work) duplicate material in the 1920 Llewellen booklet and its 1921 successor, a blue pamphlet that the Yale Law Journal published as Abbreviations and Form of Citation. For several years before the first edition of The Bluebook appeared, Yale, Columbia, and several other law journals 'worked out a tentative citation plan,' but Harvard initially opposed it 'because of skepticism as to the results to be attained and in part because of a desire not to deviate from our forms especially at the solicitation of other Reviews.' Eventually, Harvard 'reversed course' and joined the coalition by 1926. According to Judge Henry J. Friendly, 'Attorney General Brownell, whom I had known ever since law school—he was Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Law Journal the year I was at the Harvard Law Review and he and I and two others were the authors of the first edition of the Bluebook.' The cover of the 1926 A Uniform System of Citation was green. The color was 'brown from the second (1928) edition through the fifth (1936) edition. It was only with the sixth (1939) edition that it became blue.' In 1939, the cover of the book was changed from brown to a 'more patriotic blue' allegedly to avoid comparison with a color associated with Nazi Germany. The eleventh edition, published in 1967, was actually white with a blue border. The cover color returned to blue in the twelfth edition of 1976. The full text of the first (1926) through the fifteenth (1991) editions are available on the official website.