Style Points. Cite Seeing

• Author: Eliot Turner
• Pages: 8-9

HEADNOTES

Published in Litigation, Volume 48, Number 1, Fall 2021. © 2021 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be

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STYLE POINTS

Cite Seeing

ELIOT TURNER

The author is a partner w ith Norton Rose

Fulbrigh t, Houston, and a senio r editor of

Litigation.

It was a Saturday in early September.

Fall had not yet come. From a distance,

trumpets, cheers, and occasional cannon

fire—to announce the Longhorns had

scored—would remind those of us in the

law library that outside it, not too far away,

people were having fun.

I was hunched in a carrel, reading a

few pages of a draft, cite checking. Making

sure case names were properly abbrevi-

ated. That commas were italicized when

they should be, and that they weren’t

when they shouldn’t be.

That first Saturday was a home game.

The following week, the team was on the

road—which meant we weren’t missing

a game but the music festival that was

scheduled so as not to interfere with

home games. Football, after all, is im-

portant in Texas.

I spent most Saturdays that fall in the

law library leafing through The Bluebook.

Trying to ensure its rules were followed

to the letter. Not thinking too much about

what sense they made.

When I began practicing, I thought that

those Saturdays, tedious as they were, had

been useful. When I edited someone else’s

brief, I could at least make sure the cita-

tions were correct, even if I didn’t know

enough to help with much else. When

briefs I wrote myself were edited, the ci-

tations in my drafts wouldn’t return cov-

ered in red ink.

At first, I wondered if my citations

weren’t marked up simply because no one

was paying much attention. Then I got a

brief back from my boss. In the margin

was a note: “Never abbreviate American.

It’s not patriotic.”

So I stopped. And not just there. Not for

patriotic reasons, but for practical ones, I

promptly discarded “Bhd.,” “Cmty.,” “Cnty.,”

“Corr.,” and other abbreviations that saved

little space and made little sense.

A few years after my awakening, I

was given license when Richard Posner

reviewed the then-latest edition of The

Bluebook in the Yale Law Journal.

Among other things, he criticized The

Bluebook’s abbreviations, which he rightly

said violated the first rule of abbreviat-

ing: “avoid non-obvious abbreviations.”

Richard A. Posner, The Bluebook Blues,

120 Y L.J. 850, 853 (2011). To my boss’s

liking, Posner even said you should never

abbreviate “United States.” Id. at 855, 857.

Posner is not The Bluebook’s only critic—

though he is certainly a long-standing, and

Headnotes illustrations by Sean Kane