I recently ran across a reference to an old post in which Ernie Svenson offers up some thoughts on a subject near and dear to the heart of any former law review editor; namely, citation practices:
I still care more than I want to about citation format. Not because I want to, but because I know that there are judicial clerks who make judgments about my lawyerly abilities based on whether my citations are in proper format. It's sort of silly, but that's the way it is.
In Ernie's case, good citation practice makes good strategic sense. That's not always true, however. When I was a law clerk, the judge for whom I worked was a stickler for proper citation forms. I quickly discovered that he was also one of those editors who simply had to change something. It didn't seem to matter what he changed, as long as he had changed something. If my citations were all perfect, he rewrote the text. If I left in some citation errors, however, he often would fix them and leave the text alone. (I could do the same thing by leaving out his favorite phrase - "the within case" - I still don't know what that means, but leaving it out was an almost foolproof way of safeguarding the rest of the text.)
As a law professor, however, I haven't been able to figure out the proper strategy. Would I be more likely to place an article in Harvard or Yale if the bluebooking was perfect or would the editors figure they would have nothing to do and reject the article? I remain unsure, unfortunately, because Harvard and Yale have rejected everything I've ever submitted to them on spec (I got into Harvard once by invitation) - no matter how well or poorly it was bluebooked. Surely it can't be the substance ... can it?
I've run into older lawyers who still judge citations according to how the Bluebook read when they graduated from law school circa 1978. To them, anything wrong in 1978 is wrong today, regardless of what that new-fangled current edition of the Bluebook with its fancy plastic cover might say.
Posted by: Cornellian | 12/18/2009 at 06:42 PM