Is This The Biggest Bluebook Error Of Them All?

Who deserves credit (or blame) for the authoritative (and often criticized) legal citation manual?

Over the past few months, we’ve chronicled in these pages a slew of errors in the latest edition of The Bluebook, the legal-citation Bible that’s treasured by gunners everywhere (and reviled by pretty much everyone else).

Could this be the biggest Bluebook blooper of them all? Adam Liptak reports in the New York Times:

The Harvard Law Review has long claimed credit for creating The Bluebook. But a new article from two librarians at Yale Law School says its rival’s account is “wildly erroneous.” The librarians, Fred R. Shapiro and Julie Graves Krishnaswami, have done impressive archival research and make a persuasive case that their own institution is the guilty party.

“It’s clear that the idea of a uniform citation manual came from Yale, and a lot of the specifics of the early rules came from Yale,” Mr. Shapiro said in an interview. “Harvard entered into the picture later.”

So Yale really is the #1 law school — when it comes to inflicting misery upon the world. As Fred Shapiro, himself a graduate of Harvard Law, told Liptak, “The Bluebook is criticized more than it’s praised. It is often criticized for being terribly complicated.” Birthing the Bluebook isn’t necessarily a point of pride.

How did Harvard come to claim credit for The Bluebook?

The new article [by Shapiro and Krishnaswami], which will be published in The Minnesota Law Review after editors there finish making sure the citations in it follow proper Bluebook conventions, tells a different story [than former HLS Dean Erwin N. Griswold’s claim that Harvard Law Review editors came up with the idea]. The project started at Yale, it says, but for a long time Harvard kept all the money.

Yalies nerding out while Harvardians keep all the cash? Sounds about right to me.

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Mr. Shapiro and Ms. Krishnaswami trace the origins of The Bluebook to an eight-page booklet prepared in 1920 by Karl N. Llewellyn, who was editor in chief of The Yale Law Journal and would become an enormously influential law professor. A page of the booklet, possibly written with a colleague, set out a few sensible citation conventions, illustrating them with fake examples.

A decision from the Connecticut Supreme Court should be cited this way, it said: “Jones v. Smith (1911) 92 Conn. 34, 3 Atl. 56.” That example appeared again in a little pamphlet The Yale Law Journal distributed the next year called “Abbreviations and Form of Citation.” Both documents had blue covers, perhaps because that is Yale’s school color.

So is that why The Bluebook is blue? Maybe HLS should try to wrest The Maroonbook away from Chicago — maroon is kinda like crimson, right?

There is a 1922 document in Harvard’s files called “Instructions for Editorial Work” that Mr. Griswold said was the basis for The Bluebook, first published in 1926. But there is vanishingly little overlap between the Harvard document and the first Bluebook. On the other hand, the exact Connecticut Supreme Court citation and similar specific examples, as well as a great deal of other material, had somehow migrated from Yale into The Bluebook.

A 1925 report from the president of The Harvard Law Review seemed to confirm Yale’s presence at the creation. “A year ago,” he wrote, “The Yale Law Journal started a movement for a uniform mode of citation.”

This sounds to me like a fairly strong case in favor of Yale over Harvard as the originator of The Bluebook.

So should you feel angry towards Yale the next time you open up that 582-page monstrosity called The Bluebook? No, according to Fred Shapiro and Julie Graves Krishnaswami: “although the Bluebook version that subsequently developed under the leadership of Harvard Law Review currently consists of 582 fairly large pages, the two earliest Yale precursors of the Bluebook were, respectively, one page and fifteen pages long. And these were very small pages.”

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Yale Finds Error in Legal Stylebook: Harvard Did Not Create It [New York Times]

Earlier: A Bluebooking Error In… The Bluebook?
An Embarrassing Typo… In The Bluebook?
WTF Bluebook?! Even More Bluebooking Errors In The Bluebook
A Modest Proposal For Bluebook Reform