Bluebook 101

A Uniform System of Citation: The Bluebook is the definitive style guide for legal citation in the United States. For generations, law students, lawyers, scholars, judges, and other legal professionals have relied on The Bluebook's uniform system of citation in their writing. In a diverse and rapidly changing legal profession, The Bluebook continues to provide a systematic method by which members of the profession communicate important information to one another about the sources and legal authorities upon which they rely in their work.

The Law Library has a copy on Course Reserve. Older versions are available.

The Chicago Manual of Style is considered the definitive guide for anyone who works with words. It has been prepared with an eye toward how we find, create, and cite information. It offers updated guidelines on electronic workflows and publication formats, tools for PDF annotation and citation management, web accessibility standards, and effective use of metadata, abstracts, and keywords.

The citation chapters reflect the universe of electronic sources--including social media posts and comments, private messages, and app content--and also offer updated guidelines on such issues as DOIs, time stamps, and e-book locators.

Book.
Includes

• Overview of changes in the 20th Edition of The Bluebook
• Introduction to cite-checking
• The Bluebook trap : typeface conventions
• Citation form for cases
• Citation form for statutes, legislative materials, uniform acts, court rules, and constitutions
• Secondary sources -- Administrative and executive materials and court and litigation documents
• Electronic databases and the Internet
• Punctuation, quotations, omissions, alterations, and parentheticals
• Short forms, signals, related authority, and capitalization
• Putting it together
• The final review

Learning legal citation is one of the difficult (and sometimes admittedly annoying) tasks that students new to the law face. This book is designed to ease that task. It initially focuses on conventions that underlie all accepted forms and systems of legal citation. Building on that understanding and an explanation of the process of using citations in legal writing, the book then discusses and illustrates the particular rules of The Bluebook and the ALWD Citation Guide for citing cases, statutes, and all other major legal sources. Its unique appendices provide a useful reference resource to aid students in formulating citations.