I detest footnotes. Except for this one, this letter has none. Does anyone use footnotes when they write a friend? Are there footnotes in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass? Or the US Constitution, for that matter? Why does the law academy insist on footnotes? For one, they are archaic. A hyperlink sends you to the relevant text ...
For another, footnotes are pedantic. Academics cite to other academics in footnotes, to pretend that they’ve read the drivel written by others – in the hope that others will read their drivel. Footnotes are mostly drivel-reinforcement – no? And then, some footnotes are where authors (law professors are not “writers”) put their clever insights, hoping not to interrupt the flow of the drivel in the text of their writings. Sometimes these asides are more interesting than the main show, but usually they’re just pedantic.
Finally, footnotes are an impediment to following and understanding the text. Maybe that’s their purpose. The reader is asked after almost each sentence to look at the bottom of the page, read something that’s mostly useless, and then return to the body of the text. By the time the reader finds where they were, their train of thought is derailed. ...
But what I really detest is the Blue Book. It’s put out by Chicago in order to keep law academics from thinking. That’s right. Law students are so concerned about whether a comma gets italicized or not in the citation of a law review article that they don’t notice that the law review article is drivel. Or, worse, that it advocates something that is both logically untenable and morally unacceptable. I’m convinced that this is why Chicago put out the Blue Book, so that law students and law scholars would not notice that Law & Economics is ... dangerous. More on this later.
Actually, I believe you'll find that Chicago put out the Maroonbook.
