Legal Citation

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• Readings:
  • Peter W. Martin, Introduction to Basic Legal Citation: read the What and Why section and the How to Cite section.
  • The Indigo Book: An Open and Compatible Implementation of A Uniform System of Citation: read the Foreword, Introduction, and Background Rules sections.
• Notes: In some ways, legal citation is a citation system like any other–a set of mechanical rules for how to describe a source. But it has some unusual properties that are worth paying attention to. First, it is a more elaborate system than any other I am aware of, with a variety of unique conventions for what information must be included and how it should be presented. Second, because it is used by practicing lawyers as well as scholars, and because the nature of authority in law is different than in other fields, it serves some goals (such as rapidly indicating why a source is being cited) that other citation systems do not. Peter Martin is a former dean of Cornell Law School and deeply knowledgable about the history and practice of legal citation.
• Questions:
  1. How is legal citation different from citation in other fields?
  2. What are the goals of a citation system? How well do the citation systems you have used meet them?
  3. Regardless of how citations are formatted, why does legal scholarship use so many of them?
• Additional Resources:
  • Anatomy of Basic Legal Citations. A nicely-formatted cheat sheet for the most common types of legal citations.
  • Orin S. Kerr, A Theory of Law, 16 Green Bag 2d 111 (2012). This is a joke, but also maybe not quite a joke.
  • There is a small cottage industry of articles attacking the Bluebook. Some call for reforming it to be less detailed, some call for throwing the whole thing out. Notable examples include Paul Gowder, An Old-Fashioned Bluebook Burning , 1 Northwestern Law Journal Des Refusés 1 (2024); Richard A. Posner, Goodbye to the Bluebook, 53 University of Chicago Law Review 1343 (1986); James Ming Chen, Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue, 58 University of Chicago Law Review 1527 (1991); David Ziff, The Worst System of Citation Except for All the Others, 66 Journal of Legal Education 668 (2017)
  • For background on the history and evolution of the Bluebook and legal citation, see Fred R. Shapiro and Julie Graves Krishnaswami, The Secret History of the Bluebook, 100 Minnesota Law Review 1563 (2016)
  • Peter Martin’s Citing Legally blog features some outstanding deep dives on the nuances of legal citation.
  • There have been numerous attempts to automate legal citation. Many of them are badly incomplete, make basic and easily spotted mistakes, or both. The only two software packages that I can recommend are Juris-M (a Zotero fork with a Word plugin) and Hereinafter (a LaTeX package). I have used both, currently use Hereinafter, and can provide pointers and advice on getting started if you would like.