Appellate Law

Citations of the future

By Greg May

Duke University professor Joan A. Magat has an article up at SSRN suggesting changes in footnote use in academic legal writing, but the future she predicts for legal journals in “Bottom Heavy: Legal Footnotes” may be the future of all legal authority:

No more paper: just electronic journals with links to sources. That?s what?s ahead. All this current, Bluebook-inspired preoccupation with small caps and spacing initials and the like will go the way of the mastodon. One of these days, we?ll have just URLs. They?ll have to be correct, or they won?t work. And they?ll have to last.

If you’re an academic writer, you should check out the article. Here’s the abstract at SSRN, where you can access the complete article after signing up for a free account:

For decades, legal footnotes have been the deserving target of both ample criticism and self-mockery. Apart from their complaints as to footnotes? mere existence, most critics draw a bead on the ballooning of footnote content. Some journal editors, aspiring to respond to this sound theme, hopefully inform their authors of a preference for ?light footnoting.? But where does an author begin to trim, and what editor has the audacity to slash what the author (or her research assistant) has so laboriously compiled below the line? Changing our footnote habits is about benefits and costs. To gain the former, we must ante up. If criticism began the round of bidding, this article modestly raises the stakes, suggesting a rule of reason that might govern the author?s, the editor?s, and the reader?s expectations for footnotes. A gamble, perhaps, but one that might be worth taking.

Full post as published by The California Blog of Appeal on January 15, 2010 (boomark / email).