Statute of Frogs

Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy makes the case for abolishing the Bluebook and talks about why it will never happen. Many people have commented both agreeing and disagreeing. The arguments against the bluebook largely break down into two categories

1. The Bluebook is too complex and dealing with its intricacies is an enormous waste of professors’ and students time
2. Lots of portions of the legal world (and the non-legal academic world) do just fine without it

These statements are both in some sense true as far as they go, but I think they miss the point.

First, the Bluebook is not to blame for the huge amount of time that law review members spend editing articles. Once an editor is reasonably familiar with the Bluebook (which is, after all, the reason for write-on competitions), the vast majority of citations can be looked up within a minute or two. What takes far more time is cite checking. In fact, Bluebook citation formats are as complex as they are largely to ensure that all the information needed to check an article’s citations are present. We can discuss the merits of having armies of law students checking the citations for legal scholarship separately, but the ills of that practice shouldn’t be heaped on the Bluebook.

Second, any publication needs to have a style guide. Style guides are, by nature, big and complicated. The Chicago Manual of Style runs to over 900 pages, including over 200 pages devoted to citation. The Bluebook is complicated because it aims to be comprehensive and because law review articles cite a dizzying array of sources. If the Bluebook were simpler, editors would have to make judgment calls more often.

The Bluebook doesn’t get used in the “real” world because consistency is far less important. If a lawyer’s citation style in her filings with one judge don’t match those she files with another, no one cares. If two articles printed in the same issue of the same journal have different citation conventions, that look shoddy and unprofessional.

Don’t get me wrong. I would never argue that the Bluebook isn’t picayune and extraordinarily anal. And many of the editors who use it are even worse. But it serves a useful purpose and isn’t responsible for all the ills of the way in which legal journals operate.

Incidentally, Somin’s economic argument about why the Bluebook will never be abolished is spot on. The people who would have to make that decision (the editorial board of a given journal) are the very people with the least to gain (since they’ve already gotten pretty handy with the Bluebook) and the most to lose (since they’d have to deal with the chaotic editing that would result in the short term from any change).