Legal Commentary

Dave Hoffman at Concurring Opinions posted an interesting article about ALWD, a citiation format taught in many legal writing programs. The upshot is that, although similar to the Blue Book citation format, it is not identical and is thus being rejected at many schools because employers desire students who know how to "bluebook" rather than use some other format. The post has a lot of interesting feedback from LRW professors about their experiences.

I had a couple comments on the post, and they turned out to be long enough for a post of their own.

I think the worries about imperfect bluebooking or ALWD in practices are overrated. I was (and still am) a terrible bluebooker, and I never got chided by a district or appellate court (and I've been in front of some tough ones). Indeed, courts often fail to follow the bluebook.



That said, I do think lack of knowing bluebook has two important effects, both of which are created by over-rigidity, IMHO. First, if employers are asking if you know the blubook (instead of knowing how to do citation), and you can't answer yes, then that's a problem. Granted, it's an overly rigid question to ask and an unprincipled sorting mechanism, because one can learn the basic bluebook principles pretty quickly and the hard ones should be looked up anyway to make sure they haven't changed.



More important (to me at least) is the role of students as research assistants. When I first started teaching, my first two RAs were not on law review. I asked them to put citations in memos and to bluebook articles. The citations were always just off. For the longest time, I was really irritated. Then I realized that they were doing ALWD, not bluebook format. Incidentally, we started teaching the bluebook a year later; there was just no justification for teaching a system that no one in practice actually uses.



Now, why was I irritated when judges might not have been? Because of the rigidity required by the law reviewsto which  I submit articles. They want bluebook, and submitting a draft that's not in conformance reduces the chances of acceptance by some amount when I'm competing with others that have perfect citations. (I don't mean to imply that all articles editors consider the amount of work in editing, but it's not a chance I want to take, especially pre-tenure).



If I knew that any consistent citation format that indicated source would be sufficient and equally judge by every review, I wouldn't have checked so closely or have been so irritated initially. Thus, it's a closed system. We use a rigid format because we are told we have to; we don't want editors to be irritated in the same way I was. Perhaps at some point the rigidity will relent, but it won't be before I get tenure, so bluebooking it is (and goodbye ALWD).