Is The Bluebook About To Be Killed Off?

What kind of silver bullet could kill this venerable institution?

In the mists of the ancient past, the American legal profession agreed to cede responsibility for developing a consistent citation method to the most anal-retentive of law school gunners determined to lord their mastery of unnecessary commas over people. Ultimately, the whole thing is an exercise in hazing law students. Torturing students over questions of underlining or italics is kind of a lame hazing ritual, but long gone are the days when a young Louis Brandeis was dared by ne’er-do-well Harvard 3Ls to head down to the local theater and yell “Fire!”

But the Bluebook is also a cash cow because every lawyer needs to own a copy that they’ll promptly ignore because in the real world, everyone blindly trusts their online research database to get it right and barring that, no one much cares about the minutiae of the Bluebook as long as everyone can easily find the source. Besides, you can get close enough for government work with the outdated ratty copy you were issued in law school. Very few judges are going to flip out if you signal “See” where you could just insert the cite.

Now that cash cow is in jeopardy, because one law professor thinks he can get everyone a free copy of the Stickler’s Bible. How, you ask?

The answer is copyright, of course. Specifically, per LawGives:

On Monday, Christopher Sprigman, law professor at NYU, sent a remarkable letter to the firm representing The Harvard Law Review Association. The letter was sent on behalf of Public.Resource.org and contains some interesting statements, that may change the landscape of legal citation.

The first statement was that “[…] research has established that the copyright on the 10th edition of The Bluebook, published in 1958, was never renewed. As a consequence, the 10th edition is in the public domain.” 

Public.Resource.org is planning to publish an electronic version of the 10th Edition of the Bluebook guide, which is just over a quarter the size of the latest, 19th Edition.

So Public Resource aims to make the 10th edition available free online in the very near future. Look, a lot has changed since 1958. Unpublished opinions available only on Westlaw, for example. But as mentioned above, you can copy that stuff directly from the database. Indeed, the current edition is almost four times bigger than the 1958 edition. Still, the core — how to cite a case — remains basically the same, so you could get by with an older copy.

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Moreover, the overall consistency of the core citation methods arms Professor Sprigman with another argument: if large swaths of the 19th edition are unchanged from the 10th edition, perhaps the copyright status of the current edition is in dispute. Coupled with the argument that the government has endorsed the use of the Bluebook’s content, the Bluebook has a real fight on its hands.

This letter is the latest evolution in an escalating dialogue between Public.Resource.org and the Harvard Law Review Association. An earlier letter by Carl Malamud, founder of Public.Resource.org, and this blog post by Robert Richards shed some light onto the background of this story.

And the battle continues. Hopefully these parties will land themselves in court so we can run a contest to see who can find the most Bluebooking errors in legal briefs about Bluebooking.

The end of Bluebook or a new beginning? [LawGives Blog]

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