The Goodson Blogson

The new twenty-second edition of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation was published late last month. A joint project of the editors of four top law reviews (Columbia, Harvard, Penn, and Yale), the Bluebook provides guidance on citation forms for both practitioners (the Bluepages) and academics (the Whitepages). So what’s new in the 22d edition's 35 extra pages? Promising "hundreds of edits, large and small" (using the same introductory boilerplate as the 21st edition), the Preface contains a summary of noteworthy changes, with a similar explanatory list at W.S. Hein . Some of the key changes include the new introductory signal "contrast" in Rule 1.2 , expanded Special Citation Forms in Rule 15.8 (including a streamlined citation for Wright & Miller's Federal Practice and Procedure ), and a new Rule 14.4 on state administrative law materials, pushing the former rule at that number on commercial electronic databases to 14.5 . Electronic sources...

Thanks to robust free access through government websites, as well as subscription resources with primary law, most American legal researchers can locate a U.S. state or federal court opinion or statute with ease. But what about finding primary legal materials from other countries? Online access can vary widely, and language barriers can also make searching difficult. Whenever you're tasked with tracking down legal materials from outside the U.S., keep these three helpful starting places in mind. The Bluebook , Table 2: Foreign Jurisdictions . While selective in the number of countries it covers, the legal citation manual The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (20th ed. 2015) has increased its attention to non-U.S. jurisdictions in recent editions. The Bluebook table for a particular country (listed alphabetically by country name in Table 2) highlights preferred sources and citation formats for most primary legal materials, and includes titles, dates, and URLs where availab...

[This is a guest post by Reference Librarian and Senior Lecturing Fellow Marguerite Most .] Whether you're returning to Duke after a summer away, or you're new to Duke Law School and just beginning your legal career, you'll soon learn that a new 20th edition of The Bluebook has arrived. The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation is the legal citation manual followed by journals at Duke Law School, taught in the LARW course required of all 1L students, and used at most law schools nationwide. Print copies of the 20th edition are available on reserve at the Circulation/Reserve desk and the new electronic (subscription) version is available for purchase online . For a practical introduction to the 2015 edition of The Bluebook , see the Goodson Blogson post of June 5 which announced this new 20th edition, highlighted several significant rule changes and linked to a list of differences between the 19th and 20th editions. A change that will surely please law review editors...

Last week, the long-awaited 20th edition of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation hit bookshelves. While the Goodson Law Library's copies have yet to arrive, the 20th edition will replace its 2010 predecessor on Reserve after arrival and processing. Bluebook users with subscription access to the electronic version at LegalBluebook.com can already view the new edition online. (Purchasers of the print edition will also receive a code for a 30-day free trial of the online version; or the book can be purchased as a bundle with online access for up to 3 years.) In the meantime, legal researchers have already begun noting the latest rule changes. Law librarian Janelle Beitz compiled a list of differences between the 19th and 20th editions on Google Drive. The new edition clarifies rules regarding quotations within a quotation, adds sources and terms to various tables, and includes some new material in Rule 18, which governs the citation of electronic resources. Although the B...

Are you a regular user of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation ? If so, the editors of this long-running legal citation manual and style guide want to hear from you. From now through Friday, November 8, a survey on LegalBluebook.com is gathering opinions about the clarity and usability of the current Bluebook , to help inform potential changes to the next edition. The detailed survey includes questions about each rule and table of the Bluebook , with plenty of room for additional comments. Share your thoughts on your favorite – or least favorite – rules; compare the print edition to its electronic counterparts ( on the web and in mobile form ); and contribute ideas to improve the next edition. Responses will be reviewed by the team of top law review editors who publish the Bluebook (a joint effort from Columbia, Harvard, Penn, and Yale). The Bluebook improvement survey also includes an optional prize drawing for respondents who choose to leave their contact information. ...

Did you ever wish that The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation would go back to its 28-page roots ? While the ever-expanding citation manual (now up to a hefty 511 pages in its current 19th edition) probably will never shrink back down to its original size, you can still carry it in the palm of your hand. The Bluebook editors (a joint effort of the Columbia Law Review, the Harvard Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and The Yale Law Journal) have granted exclusive rights to a mobile version within the recently-launched rulebook™ mobile app from Ready Reference Apps. This mobile version of The Bluebook is now available for sale (iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch) in the iTunes App Store . The Bluebook library is available for $39.99 within the larger rulebook™ app, which also includes libraries of federal rules and selected state court rules. If the app isn't compatible with your own mobile device, never fear – the Bluebook editors also offer a web-based su...

Some things never change. In spring 2009, the Goodson Blogson came to the rescue of frustrated Duke Law 1Ls with a post about formatting tables of contents and tables of authorities , just in time to turn in their LARW appellate briefs. And while those lucky students are now set to graduate in May (hopefully expert in the art of table-generation), the same questions have recurred every subsequent spring with each new crop of 1Ls. Since new versions of popular word-processing programs have debuted since our last post (some dramatically changing the instructions for generating these tables), it's high time for an update. Tables of contents and tables of authorities were most likely not required in undergraduate writing projects, so they can be entirely new ground for many first-year law students. Don’t fall into the trap of creating these tables from scratch — most word-processing programs can generate them automatically. Since instructions will vary depending on what product you ar...

Not a Bluebook fan? You’re in distinguished company. As Above the Law reported earlier today , Judge Richard A. Posner of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals has just published a humorous “review” of the new 19th edition of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation . “ The Bluebook Blues ” is available on the Yale Law Journal website, and appears in the new Winter 2010 issue (which will arrive in print at the library soon). Posner’s disdain for the Bluebook has been well-documented since at least 1986, when he published an even more scathing critique in the Chicago Law Review , featuring a list of the nineteen most obnoxious “ anti-lessons ” in writing which Posner believed the Bluebook rules reinforced (#1: overuse of passive voice; #10: “Always be stuffy, boring”). Noting that the Bluebook has more than doubled in page length since his last review, Posner now describes it as a “monstrous growth, remote from the functional need for legal citation forms, that serves obscure needs of...

As 1Ls make progress on their open memo assignment and 2Ls/3Ls slog through cite-checking journal assignments, it seems like everyone could use a helping hand with The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation these days. The Goodson Law Library has some spare copies on Reserve for when you just need to confirm an abbreviation or a rule, and there is also an online version (paid subscription required) which offers full-text searching of the new 19th edition and the ability to save personal annotations for future tricky cites. But what people really seem to want is a tool to convert citations automatically into proper Bluebook format. We’re often asked for advice on shortcuts to perfect legal citation: everything from “Can’t I just copy what it says on Lexis and Westlaw?” to “Is there a citation management software that will put footnotes together for me?” We’ve previously written about citation management tools such as EndNote and Zotero , which offer some support for Bluebook styl...

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 mate...

If you’ve visited the Goodson Law Library recently, you may have noticed a mysterious box of DVDs on the service desk. These discs contain more than 800 interactive legal tutorials from CALI, the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction ( http://www.cali.org ). First-year students will use CALI later this semester to complete a Bluebook exercise in LARW class. However, your experience with CALI shouldn’t stop there. CALI lessons are available for all of the major areas of law school study, and range from 10-minute reviews of a single concept ( Defenses ) to multi-part tutorials to be completed over several days ( a sprawling Contracts review ). Most tutorials will take between 30-60 minutes, and their target completion time is clearly indicated before you begin. Each lesson is authored by a law school instructor or librarian, and is carefully reviewed before publication in order to ensure clarity and helpfulness. For the most current versions of the tutorials on the CALI DVD (o...

While The Bluebook remains the style manual of choice for most law reviews and legal journals, there are times when it does not answer a particular citation question. Often, journals and law reviews will designate a non-legal citation manual, such as the Chicago Manual of Style , to control citation of document types (or other matters) not covered by Bluebook . Other, more interdisciplinary, journals may use a non-legal manual exclusively, such as the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association . This means that academics who are preparing manuscripts for publications (as well as the student research assistants or journal editors who are helping to format citations correctly) need to be aware of citation manuals beyond The Bluebook . The Goodson Law Library maintains a collection of selected non-legal citation manuals in its Reference Collection (Level 3). Their locations, as well as electronic access through the University, are noted below: • Chicago Manual of Style ...

Even before the renovated Law Library had reopened, Duke’s nine student-edited journals had already begun the process of cite-checking their selected articles. A number of electronic resources make this job easier, and should be useful to cite-checkers as well as any other legal researchers. Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations : There are several abbreviation dictionaries available in the Law Library’s Reference Collection, but this site (from the University of Cardiff in Wales) can be accessed anywhere at any time. Search by title or by abbreviation to decipher those mysterious citations--always the first step to locating an item. Finding Legal Materials in PDF : This research guide was created in response to the library’s renovation, since 95% of the print collection was moved into inaccessible off-site storage. It remains a useful guide to locating the full text of many common legal materials, including primary (cases, statutes, legislative history materials) and secondary (law re...

For more than 80 years, The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation has been the leading style manual for law schools. Now, the authors of the Bluebook (which include the law review associations at Columbia, Harvard, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania) have unveiled The Bluebook Online ( http://www.legalbluebook.com/Public/Tour.aspx ) , a service which allows subscribers to read, search and annotate the current edition of the Bluebook from the Web. Prices start at $25 for a one-year subscription; students can purchase up to a 3-year subscription at http://www.legalbluebook.com/Purchase/Products.aspx . The Law Library is currently investigating ways to incorporate The Bluebook Online into its database subscriptions. If you have tried The Bluebook Online, or have comments after viewing the video tours at http://www.legalbluebook.com/Public/Tour.aspx , please give us your feedback. (Print devotees need not worry - the old-fashioned paper Bluebook isn't going away anytime ...