Law Journal Bluebooking

There are three main differences between the Bluebooking you did for Legal Writing and the Bluebooking you’re expected to do for a law journal article:

• formatting: Whereas for legal writing, you were forced to use one of the more annoying fonts in existence, for a law journal article, you get to use such cool things as italics and small caps. Also, your citations are in footnotes or endnotes, rather than in the text.
  
• sources: for Legal Writing, you've only cited to cases and, possibly, statutes. For your article, you'll be citing to secondary sources as well, such as law journals and news sources.
  
• short forms: how to cite something again after you’ve already cited it. And the last big thing is that you’ll be citing to sources other than cases.

Citing Cases

Full Citation: The first time you cite a case, you cite the case in full without italics (please note the irony):

¹ Crazy Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335, 353 (1963).

Short Form: After you’ve cited a case initially, the next time you cite to it, you will use its short form. Use only one party name and put it in italics and insert a cite to the specific page number ("at .") You do not put the year or the initial page number.

⁴ Crazy Gideon, 372 U.S. at 342.

Use of Id. is only appropriate when the source you are citing to is contained in the previous endnote:

⁸ Crazy Gideon, 372 U.S. at 342.
⁹ Id. at 343.

TIP: Insert citations as you're writing the article, but ONLY use the short form. You won’t really know what your initial cite will be after all the editing is done -- you may end up inserting an earlier cite to the case . Once you're done, all you have to do is just change the first time you cite the case to full cite and change short forms to Ids. where appropriate. With long articles, this will save alot of time.

Citing to Law Journals

Full Citation: The first time you cite to a journal, you include the following information with the following formatting:

Author’s Name, Title of the Article, Abbreviated Name of Journal , (Year).

Note: Look to T.14 in the Blubook, starting on page 317, for how to abbreviate the names of the different journals.

Short Form: Where id. is not appropriate, you use supra. The supra lets you refer to the footnote where you initially cited the journal article—see Rule 4.2 in the Bluebook (pg. 42):

Last Name, supra note , at .

Here’s an example:

¹¹ Jody Armour, Race Ipsa Loquitor, 46 Stan. L. Rev. 781, 783 (1994). [initial cite]

¹² Crazy Gideon, 372 U.S. at 343.

¹³ Armour, supra note 11, at 784. [short form]

¹⁴ Id. at 787-88.

TIP: As with cases, if you’re citing as you’re writing, cite to journals in the supra form. Write an “X” after “note” (e.g., Armour, supra note X, at 784) because until you’re done editing you won’t know where the initial cite will be. Once you’re done: go to the first footnote where you cited the article and provide the full citation. replace all the Xs with the footnote number where you just gave the full citation (it's all about Ctrl + H in Word)

Citing Other Sources

Look to the following places in the bluebook to see how to cite other sources:

• The Front Cover: this gives you a “quick reference” to how any source should be formatted for a journal and it also gives you the Bluebook rule that’s associated with that type of source.
  

• The Index: If there’s a type of source you can’t find, look in the index (e.g., Amicus Brief). It took me awhile before I realized the Bluebook actually has an index. However, I was very good at pretending like I knew it had an index all along.
  

• Rules for Different Sources:
• Legislative Materials: Rule 13 (pg. 91)
• Books & Nonperiodic Materials: Rule 15 (pg. 107).
• Newspapers: Rule 16.5 (pg. 120).
• Internet Sources: Rule 18.2 (pg. 132).

Short Form: normally, you would use supra with these sources as you would with journals. If there’s an institutional author (i.e., not a person), you use the name of the institution. If there’s no author, you would use the title of the work where you would normally put the author’s last name.

However, occasionally, you’ll come across a source that has a really long title or institutional author name. You can then use hereinafter to designate how you will refer to the source if you ever cite to it again (pg. 43 in BB). Your short form would then be a regular supra, but instead of the actual name or title, you would use the phrase you designated. For example:

¹⁵ Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure of Senate Comm. On the Judiciary, Sourcebook on Corporation Image and Corporate Advocacy Advertising, 1149, 1157 (1978) [hereinafter FTC Memorandum].

¹⁶ See Armour, supra note 8, at 790.

¹⁷ See FTC Memorandum, supra note 11, at 1155.

Note: if you only cite to the source once throughout the , there is no need to use hereinafter.

Using Signals

Remember that the point of a law journal article is not to regurgitate what other people think (though obviously, a portion of your paper will summarize the state of the law to some extent), but rather to put together your own argument about an issue which is supported by what other people think. In turn, most of the sentences that you write are propositions and they need to be backed up by sources. You would use signals to indicate how a source supports a particular proposition (BB 1.2 on pg. 22):

• [no signal]: The only time you should not have a signal is if you’re quoting directly from a source or if you basically just paraphrased what the source explicitly says.
  

• See: use see whenever the source supports what you say but doesn’t necessarily state it directly.
  

• See, e.g.,: use this to indicate that the source you cited to is just one of many which would support your proposition.
  

• See generally: use this when the source would provide background info about your proposition.
  

• You can also use signals indicating contradiction if appropriate (e.g. But, Contra).