The week before I started law school, way back in *mumblty-mumble*, I dutifully went down to the bookstore and purchased the approximately $8,700 worth of books required for my first semester. In addition to several impressive-looking tomes containing Very Important Stuff, I was also required to buy a small, unassuming Velo-bound book with a blue cover, called, somewhat eponymously, "The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation." At the time, I paid very little attention to it, since it paled in comparison to my much more expensive (and heavier) hard-bound law books, which had far more important-sounding subject.
Eventually I came to realize that most lawyers seldom get a chance to make a Constitutional law claim in their day-to-day practice, no one can remember how the Rule Against Perpetuities works, or why the Rule in Shelley's Case is even important, and while Palsgraf certainly does make for a fun discussion, everything you need to know about tort law can really be boiled down to ten words (Duty. Standard of Care. Breach of Duty. Proximate Cause. Damages.)
The Bluebook, though? That sucker is USEFUL. It outlines all the practical rules (something otherwise entirely absent from my law school education) for citing anything and everything you might ever want or need to cite, in any kind of legal document you might ever want or need to write. And let's face it, writing is pretty much what we lawyers get paid for. So we might as well do it right.
Anyway, that first one I got back in the dark ages was the 15th edition. I loved that book from the first time I opened it, and it was the first book I unpacked in my office at my first job. As the junior-most associate in a litigation firm, I used it every day, not only for my documents, but also to cite-check the partner's stuff (since his recollection of the rules was hazy at best). Toward the end of my tenure there, it started to get more than a little tattered-looking. The cover eventually fell off, and pages began to work their way free of the binding. Finally, the plastic binding cracked, and good old 15 was reduced to nothing more than a pile of loose pages.
The 16th edition had come and gone by then, so I bought myself a shiny new 17th edition. Along the way, I purchased an 18th addition for one of the attorneys that worked for me, who eventually moved on to greener pastures, leaving her Bluebook behind (can you imagine?!). I kept using the 17th, though, because I had all the important rules tabbed. Then one day about two months ago, I noticed that one of my attorneys had a fancy citation form for internet sources. I wondered where he got it, since the Bluebook rule on citing the internet I remembered from law school went something like "since information found on the World Wide Web is unreliable and it is unclear how long-lived the World Wide Web will be, such sources should not be used." But lo & behold, the 18th ed has not just one rule, but an entire section on citation of internet sources. It was then I realized it might be time to let number 17 go. And so, last week, I finally tabbed up the 18th, and laid number 17 to rest.
Goodbye sweet 17th edition:
And hello, shiny-new, freshly-tabbed 18th ed:
(After I wrote this long blog waxing nostalgic about my Bluebooks, I discovered that the 18th isn't even the most recent edition. Whoops.)
