Monday, June 21, 2010

"The Bluebooks Are Coming!"

Here at the Goodson Law Library, the summer’s biggest blockbuster has no explosions, car chases, or teenage vampires. Instead, we’re camping out for the new edition of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Legal Citation (19th ed. 2010). The new edition was released in early June, and we expect our copies to arrive any day now. Once the books arrive and are processed by library staff, copies of the new Bluebook will be available to borrow from the library’s Reserve collection.

Maybe you aren’t as excited as we are about this, but there are certainly some readers who will be affected by any changes to the 18th edition’s rules—such as journal members or faculty research assistants. The Pace Law Library blog has already compiled a helpful PDF chart of new or updated rules in the 19th edition. For those who learned legal citation from previous editions of the Bluebook, the chart is thankfully short, with the majority of the changes focused on Rule 18 (governing citation of electronic materials).

If you just can’t wait until the library’s print copies arrive, the Bluebook website already allows subscribers to toggle between the 18th and 19th edition texts. (They also offer a variety of affordable subscription packages for either online-only access or combinations of a print copy plus electronic access.)

For questions about legal citation during this transition period, remember to Ask a Librarian.