Substance and Style
| Publication year | 2021 |
| Pages | 23 |
| Citation | Vol. 90 No. 1 Pg. 23 |
January, 2021
Meet the New Citation Manuals: The Twenty-First Edition of the Bluebook and the Seventh Edition of the ALWD Guide
by Jeffrey D. Jackson
On September 1, 2020, just in time for the new school year, the compilers at the Columbia Law Review, the Harvard Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal released the Twenty-First Edition of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation.[1] Coupled with the coming release of the Seventh Edition of the ALWD Guide to Legal Citation [2] this summer, this means that lawyers and law students alike will soon have two new shiny versions of citation guides to use. [3]
The best news is that both citation manuals will be consistent with each other. A citation should look the same no matter which manual the author uses. This is not coincidental, and is both good and bad. The ALWD Guide's decision to conform to the Bluebook's rules for citation reflects the judgment of its author and editors that there is a benefit to having one comprehensive system of legal citation. On the other hand, the decision to conform also yokes the ALWD Guide to all the changes and vagaries that come with the publication of a new edition of the Bluebook, whether those changes make sense or not.
And there are always changes. Unless you spend a lot of time dwelling on citation minutiae, (Wait. You mean you don't? Just me?) you might be surprised to learn that with each edition of the citation manuals, changes are made. Some of these changes are undeniably for the better. For example, the Twentieth Edition of the Bluebook got rid of the awkward "available at" in front of URL cites for parallel citations to documents available on the internet. [4] This recognizes the ubiquity of the internet as a source for information that in previous years would have been obtained in print.
Occasionally, however, the changes introduced by the Bluebook alter the very fabric of legal citation itself. Okay, that sounds overly dramatic - but it's true. Witness the furor over the Sixteenth Edition of the Bluebook, which changed the entire meaning of the "see" cite. [5] (If you don't know what I'm talking about, consider yourself lucky. I've included the story in the footnotes, but you don't need to read it. Don't worry. It's fixed now. It shouldn't bother you again. . . unless you went to law school from 1996 to 2000, in which case you may still be confused about the "see" cite).
The good news with this new round is that, although there are "hundreds of edits" in the Twenty-First Edition of the Bluebook, [6] none of them are likely to spark any sort of call for torches or pitchforks. Yes, some of the abbreviations have been added or changed. Some of these changes are useful: "artificial intelligence" now has an abbreviation, fittingly, "A.I." [7] Others seem designed simply to irritate. For example, "environmental" is now "Env't" rather than the previous "Envtl." [8] This seems entirely unnecessary. It appears to be an attempt to reduce the number of abbreviations by making one serve duty for all forms of the root word, but it ends up just making the abbreviation harder to comprehend. (Although I have a sneaking suspicion that most practitioners won't abbreviate the word at all: neither Westlaw or Lexis does, and neither does the Kansas Supreme Court.) The fact is, "environmental" has been "Envtl." since its first appearance in the Twelfth Edition in 1976, and I'm not sure why it needs to be changed now.
One change that practitioners and judges might notice has to do with abbreviations for reporters. With almost all courts going to word count rather than page counts for filings, the Twenty-First Edition gives practitioners permission to "close up" reporter names. [9] Thus, F. Supp. 2d, which would read as three words for word count software now can be F.Supp.2d, which is all one word. I'm a...
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