Legal Research

I think it's safe to say that Judge Posner hasn't been particularly fond of the Bluebook for quite some time (he called the 16th edition a "grotesque 255 pages long"), and that is especially true for the new 511-page 19th edition.  Here are a few choice quotes from his review of the 19th edition in Yale Law Review:

The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation exemplifies hypertrophy in the

anthropological sense. It is a monstrous growth, remote from the functional

need for legal citation forms, that serves obscure needs of the legal culture and

its student subculture.

[N]eedless to say, I have not read the nineteenth edition. I have dipped into it, much as one might dip one?s toes in a pail of freezing water. I am put in mind of Mr. Kurtz?s dying words in Heart of Darkness ? ?The horror! The horror!? ? and am tempted to end there.

The basic rule of abbreviating, ignored by the authors of The Bluebook, is to avoid nonobvious abbreviations: don?t make the reader puzzle over an abbreviation, as The Bluebook does routinely. . . . It?s as if there were a heavy tax on letters, making it costly to write out Coast Guard Court of Criminal Appeals instead of abbreviating it ?C.G. Ct. Crim. App.?

I imagine Judge Posner would have similar harsh words for ALWD, which has now grown to a monstrous and unwieldy 661 pages.