Yale Law Students Support The End Of The Bluebook

Check out the update on the future of the Bluebook, and some Yalies are on board.

BluebookThe future is coming for the Bluebook, and some Yale Law students are on board. You mave have heard rumblings over the fate of every gunner’s best friend, the Bluebook. Seems the copyright for the 10th edition of the tome, published in 1958, was never renewed, and according to NYU Law professor Christopher Sprigman, that means it is in the public domain.

Professor Sprigman, along with Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org, have taken up this cause as a moral issue, saying that in the digital age the stranglehold the Bluebook has on legal citations is untenable. Indeed, this year the first edition of BabyBlue, a free, open-source system of legal citations, is due to be released:

Well, at least it was due to be released this year. As Professor Sprigman notes in an open letter to his law professor friends (via the Volokh Conspiracy), BabyBlue is being held up because of a potential lawsuit from the Harvard Law Review Association, the owners of the Bluebook copyright:

The work, which I’ve named ‪#‎BabyBlue‬, is now done, but we’re holding it, because the Harvard Law Review Association has hired counsel and is threatening to sue (me, and Carl Malamud of PublicResource.org, the publisher).

Writing at the Volokh Conspiracy, David Post didn’t mince words describing the questionable lawsuit:

It’s copyright nonsense, and Harvard should be ashamed of itself for loosing its legal hounds to dispense it in order to protect its (apparently fairly lucrative) publication monopoly.

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UPDATE (6:24 p.m.): Professor Sprigman has announced the official start of the BabyBlue era:

Folks that support BabyBlue are circling the wagons. And it seems Yale Law students are lining up to be early adopters (even though the Bluebook may have originated at YLS). A petition is making its way around that campus, asking students to pledge their support for an open system of citation:

We believe that Baby Blue will help ensure that no one—whether a prisoner filing her habeas petition pro se; a public interest lawyer zealously representing indigent clients on a shoestring budget; or a first-generation professional pursuing her dream of becoming a lawyer—is denied access to these rules of legal citation. We believe democratizing the rules of citation increases access to justice for all.

And quite a few students have already signed the petition — almost 30% of the student body has already signed, along with the following organizations:

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The American Constitution Society at YLS (ACS)
The Yale Civil Rights Project (YCRP)
First Generation Professionals at Yale Law (FGP)
The National Lawyers Guild at YLS (NLG)
Rebellious Lawyering Conference, 2016 Board of Directors
Yale Law & Policy Review (YLPR)

Kudos to Yale for embracing the digital, free future.

You can read the full petition on the next page.

The new (and much improved) ‘Bluebook’ caught in the copyright cross-hairs [Volokh Conspiracy]

Earlier: Is The Bluebook About To Be Killed Off?
Is This The Biggest Bluebook Error Of Them All?