A Quick Guide To The Bluebook And How To Use It Effectively

Quick Guide To The Bluebook, With the great strides that technology has made so far, the world of legal research has undergone a significant change. 

No more are attorneys, academicians, reviewers, or paralegals required to sift through piles of cumbersome paperwork to access public records, draft legal documents, or manage regulatory risks. 

Instead, they can simply subscribe to the best legal research software and build a persuasive case within no time! 

However, when it comes to preparing legal citations, many lawyers, students, and legal assistants tend to falter. 

This is because tracing authoritative documents, locating specific arguments, and citing them in a credible format can often be a tough job. 

Not only are you required to go through an enormous volume of court decisions, government documents, federal statutes, and scholarly writings, but you also have to cite them in a highly tenable and meticulous way. 

To solve this issue, the institutions of many countries have adopted a couple of de facto citation standards that aim to bring about a sense of uniformity and transparency in citing legal sources. 

Do you know what this standard is called in the US? A Bluebook! 

What Is A Bluebook? 

The Bluebook, in simple words, is a book that primarily guides and governs the formatting, style, and referencing of the American legal citation system. 

Compiled by the combined effort of Harvard, Columbia, Yale, and Pennsylvania universities, this book has been recognized as the gold standard of US law citations since 1926. 

The Bluebook prescribes a uniform format that must be followed for writing typefaces, short forms, symbols, quotations, and other similar elements in legal publications. 

Despite other citation systems, the Bluebook has gained wide acceptance across all the fifty states of the USA. 

This is because even though each one of these states has its own citation version, they mostly adhere to the Bluebook’s definitive authority in both letter and spirit. 

As a result, most legal personnel today aspire to gain a complete understanding of how the Bluebook can be effectively used to make their citations smarter and easier. 

How Should A Blue Book Be Used?

The two fundamental reasons why you should use a Bluebook are – attribution and support. 

While ‘attribution’ can help you correctly identify and credit the source of legal ideas, ‘support’ can equip you to direct your readers towards authoritative texts that render strength to your propositions. 

Nonetheless, to accomplish either one of these tasks, you first need to learn how to navigate a Bluebook most appropriately. 

Here are a few tips to help you with the same – 

Understand Its Contents

The moment you get your hands on a Bluebook, you must start by trying to understand its layout and content. A Bluebook, for most practical purposes, contains: 

• The Blue pages, which carry a condensed version of all non-academic citation rules, meant for the use of law practitioners.
• The White pages containing the highlights of academic citation rules, devised to be used by students, editors, and reviewers.
• A total of 21 basic citation rules explaining the style, references, and layout for citing specific legal documents.
• A set of 16 tables providing details like citation categories, cross-references, case laws, and abbreviations.
• A comprehensive index that enables you to quickly locate the exact citation that you want to find.

Consult The Covers

The front and back covers of a Bluebook are just as important as its page, if not more. As an attorney or an academician, you must consult them for gaining knowledge about: 

• A reference guide to law review footnotes (used for academic citation), found on the inside of the front cover
• A reference guide to legal memos, statutes, and court documents (used for non-academic citation), located on the inside of the back cover
• A detailed outline of the contents that a specific Bluebook carries, found on the outside of the back cover

Make A Cheat Sheet 

Once you have gathered a thorough grasp of the fundamentals of a Bluebook, it is time to prepare a cheat sheet for yourself! 

Use this cheat sheet as a generic guiding standard to help you focus on exactly what you need for preparing your citation. 

For instance, you can quickly a create cheat sheet which contains templates for citing the following: 

• Court rulings, case laws, or statutes
• Other records like books, reports, and treatises
• Sources which are exclusively available online

Get Accustomed With The Changes 

The 21st edition of the Bluebook has just been released in July 2021. 

As compared to its predecessor, this edition harbors some major changes with respect to the introduction of new sections, improvement of previous versions, and removal of irrelevant resources. 

Getting accustomed to such incremental changes, which tend to be made from one edition to another, will enable you to utilize the Bluebook and its citation formats, judiciously and effectively. 

Seek Help 

Before you use any digital research software, you tend to conduct comprehensive research about it. Quick Guide To The Bluebook.

Be it Westlaw testimonials or lexis advance review – you make sure that you can get all the help you need before subscribing to either one of these platforms. 

With Bluebook too, you should ideally follow the very same routine! 

Try to seek assistance from:

• Quick reference covers that contain essential citation formats
• Bluebook index which lists the location of all the relevant pages
• Fellow practitioners and academicians who are fluent with the book
• Other experts who have formalized the citation process

To Sum Up 

The good thing about the modern, digital era is that you don’t have to physically refer to the Bluebook anymore. This book of codified legal standards is now available in an online format. 

Attorneys, legal consultants, and law firms can simply visit the redesigned, mobile-optimized Bluebook and prepare their legal citations with efficiency, quickness, and ease. 

And this is just the tip of the iceberg! Quick Guide To The Bluebook.

The latest edition of this digitized Bluebook also allows you to seamlessly switch between its print and online versions, without compromising with your numbering, content, and layout! 

More so, it permits you to pin rules, mark pages, and access records in an incredibly personalized manner. 

So, what are you waiting for? Supplement your legal research with the aid of your quintessential legal partner – your Bluebook – Get Quick Guide To The Bluebook now!