Legal Commentary

[By request, I am reprinting here this post from my humor blog, The Backbencher.]

Ah, spring! To borrow some words from Browning and Tennyson: The hill-side's dew-pearl'd, the lark's on the wing, and a young law student's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of law review ...

Perhaps as many as a third or even half of law students try out for their school?s law review. Why? Of course, it has nothing to do with how prestigious law review is, it is instead because of these students? sincere love for legal abbreviations.

Students doing law review spend a lot of time making sure things are abbreviated properly. The Bible of legal abbreviations is the ?Bluebook,? a style manual concocted by a group of student-run law reviews from various schools in order to ?greatly simplify?1 the process of writing and editing their articles.

The Bluebook has made important contributions to the advancement of human society. For instance, one great achievement of the Bluebook was the abbreviation of the word ?law.? After many years of working with this awkward and unwieldy word, editors suddenly hit upon the idea of replacing it with the abbreviation ?L.? Scholars have now had decades added to their academically productive years by the cumulative time savings of not having to read so many unnecessary aw?s.

The following is a REAL abbreviation from the Bluebook, if you don?t believe me, you can look it up on page 159 of the 16th Edition:

It stands for European Consultative Assembly, and apparently, it is used so often in legal scholarship, that the law review folks wanted it to have its very own abbreviation, thus saving scholars countless hours by not having to type, ?opean,? ?ative? and ?embly.?2

When people talk about going to law school to make people?s lives better, this is exactly the kind of work they?re talking about.

Eur. Consult. Ass. sounds bad enough. But what about when you need to abbreviate just "European Assembly"? Um, Beavis? You just subcited ?Eur. Ass.?.3 Heh-heh heh-heh.

HEY NOW! Don?t you dare sigh and roll your eyes! If you?re put off by the semi-obscene content of the Bluebook, then you take it up with the people responsible. It?s not my fault.

While Bluebook abbreviations have allowed great time-savings in terms of reading and typing, it is true that the obscure referencing system has caused lawyers, judges and academics to spend days, or even weeks, trying to figure out abbreviations such as ?S. Exec. Doc. W. ?4

Nonetheless, a greater good is done in that over the decades, Bluebook abbreviations have saved approximately a third of an ounce of the world?s ink supply. Cost adjusted for inflation, this is a savings of nearly 1.4 cents!

Tireless workers that they are, law review editors will abbreviate a word even if they can only trim just a couple of letters off. For instance, Sweden, Russia, Brazil and Turkey are, respectively, Swed., Russ., Braz., and Turk.

After seeing those, you might be shocked to learn that they refused to abbreviate ?Mauritania,? ?Cote d?Ivorie? or ?Sao Tome & Principe.?

Oh, you say, those countries are too obscure to abbreviate. OH YEAH?? Check this out: Greece, a country of 11 million, gets spelled out, BUT the Seychelles ? an Indian Ocean island nation of just 78,000 people ? gets the abbreviation ?Sey.?

At this point, ?#@*%$&@#$?!??!?!?!? is an excellent question you may have. And you know what? I have no idea. But I?m sure they have their reasons. And after you make law review, I hope you?ll call me up and tell me what you find out.

Gd. Lk.! Th. nat?n of Sey. is cntng. on u. ...

________________________

Footnotes:

1. Admittedly, my words.

2. ?Eur. Consult. Ass.? has been used in all of 46 law review articles, per Lexis, as of April 21, 2008.

3. See James Barr Ames, Novation, 6 Harv. L. Rev. 184, 186-187, n.3 (1896).

4. ?S. Exec. Doc. W.? has appeared in a total of three law review articles, per Lexis, as of April 21, 2008.

[I wrote this Backbencher classic when I was a 1L. Some editing aside, this content originally appeared in the Harvard Law Record in 1998.]