The Bluebook: An Insider’s Perspective

M. Burke Craighead* June, 2026

The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation. Edited by Columbia Law Review Association, Harvard Law Review Association, University of Pennsylvania Law Review and The Yale Law Journal. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Law Review Association. 2025. Pp. XVII, 390. $49.

Introduction

“I love The Bluebook. Thank you for the hard work you put into it.” An email of this kind has never been, and likely will never be, sent to the Harvard Law Review ’s inbox. Students,¹ professors,² practitioners,³ and judges⁴ love to hate The Bluebook. The criticisms of The Bluebook range from calling it “totalitarian”⁵ and “a monstruous growth”⁶ to alleging it “suffers from a bad case of federal parochialism”⁷ and serves no function other than “to haze initiates to the profession.”⁸ This is merely a sampling, but I could go on (and others have).⁹ Unfortunately, much of this criticism stems from an incomplete picture of The Bluebook ’s revision process, rules, and purpose.

I have a more complex relationship with The Bluebook. For volume 138 of the Harvard Law Review, I was The Bluebook Editorial & Strategy Chair,¹⁰ and that year coincided with the editing and release of the twenty-second edition of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation.¹¹ Throughout the process of producing the next edition of The Bluebook, I received lots of feedback. And through that feedback, I saw persistent trends in the questions and problems people had.

This Review provides an insider’s look at The Bluebook—the complaints, the revision process, and the politics. It is not a defense of The Bluebook. It is, however, a suggestion that many of the criticisms of The Bluebook are misplaced. From my perch within The Bluebook, I came to realize The Bluebook reflects what is wrong with our culture of legal education. In other words, The Bluebook does not work as well as it should because legal education does not work as well as it should.

Part I of this Review provides some background to The Bluebook ’s revision process. Namely, it discusses the committee-style editing process and how internal politics at the four partner journals (the Harvard Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and The Yale Law Journal ) shape decisionmaking. It also explains that, oftentimes, conflicting urges lead to unsatisfactory results for editors and Bluebook users alike.

With this background in mind, Part II argues that regardless of how we go about revising it, fixing The Bluebook is essentially impossible. Despite the flood of complaints, questions, and suggestions, I saw two major impediments to fixing The Bluebook. First, there is the conflict between simplicity and complexity. Second, there is the problem of learning costs. Part II discusses both.

Finally, Part III turns to the purpose of The Bluebook. In many ways, debates over the purpose of The Bluebook mirror the larger debates about the purpose of law school. The Bluebook has struggled to be too many things to too many people. But this is a product of our legal educational culture that is itself desperately divided on the purpose of law schools and legal scholarship more generally.

This Review is not a hit-piece or tell-all about The Bluebook. If you want the juicy details of backroom deals, you have come to the wrong place.¹² This Review is a recognition that no one is satisfied with The Bluebook. I’m unsatisfied with it, and I wrote part of the thing. What this Review attempts to explain is why everyone who uses The Bluebook has a question, complaint, or general sense of dread about it. The root cause of these issues is institutional, but much of it is a product of legal education. By providing an insider’s perspective on The Bluebook, my hope is that the legal community can redirect complaints about The Bluebook toward the more important underlying problems that give rise to The Bluebook ’s notoriety.

I. The Revision Process

No other profession in the world tasks students with developing its citation style guide.¹³ Yet, the legal profession has largely offloaded this task (along with the task of publishing legal scholarship) to second- and third-year law students.¹⁴ That means approximately eight editors from the Harvard Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and The Yale Law Journal control how practitioners and scholars cite cases, books, articles, statutes, and more.¹⁵ The consequences of placing such immense power in the hands of a few students include arbitrariness, contradiction, and hubris.

This Part details the revision process that produces the new edition of The Bluebook every five years. It then turns to the conflicting—and at times rapidly evolving—political urges among the four partner journals. These conflicts contribute to the dissatisfaction associated with The Bluebook, but they also reflect larger debates surrounding legal academia and legal education.

A. Process

The basic outline of making a new Bluebook edition is as follows: During the years preceding a new edition, editors at the four partner journals collect feedback from scholars, practitioners, and students about The Bluebook.¹⁶ Using this feedback, each journal compiles a list of suggested edits. The year before a new edition is due to be published, the editors meet to discuss proposed changes. For the twenty-second edition, the partner journals operated by consensus—every edit required unanimous support. After edits are agreed upon, they are divided among the schools to be implemented. Each school is then responsible for turning in the new version of their assigned rules and tables to Harvard. From there, the Harvard editors take the lead on compiling the edits into the final Bluebook document. That document then goes through the normal proof editing of a regular law review article before being sent off to the printer.

What seems simple on paper nevertheless breaks down in practice. There are several problems I noticed during my time as the lead editor for The Bluebook. First, the partner journals have varying commitments to The Bluebook. The starkest example is The Yale Law Journal, which abolished its Bluebook editor position in 2023.¹⁷ This shifted The Bluebook workload onto one of Yale’s managing editors. Second, the revision process cannot control individual editors’ commitment to The Bluebook. Making edits during the late spring and summer of 2L year is not conducive to timely work. Because officer transitions happen on different timelines at each school, delays inevitably occurred. Due dates set for April and May stretched into the summer. One school’s editor turned in drafts originally due in April two months into his clerkship, in August. Because everyone is working on a different timeline, there is also a greater likelihood for contradictions in rules and tables. And new editors taking over the job are often thrown into the middle of the process without a full understanding of why decisions were made or how their assigned sections are supposed to fit into the larger scheme of revisions.

Third, there is no real enforcement mechanism for ensuring work is completed. Two journals turned in much of their work late, and one journal failed to turn in some work at all. But there is very little each journal can do to ensure other journals meet their deadlines. The relationship among the journals is governed by a long-term contract lacking enforcement mechanisms other than mediation, arbitration, or litigation—costly and extreme sanctions we have never deployed.¹⁸ As a result, many critical editorial decisions are made on a tight timeline with little opportunity for deliberation. Worse yet, in some cases where a draft was never turned in, I made unilateral changes to compile the final document. Therefore, in such situations, there was no collaboration among the partner journals.

Finally, each Bluebook editor must contend with internal policies at their individual journal. Often, the editors would reach a collective decision only for someone to express doubt over whether they were authorized to make that decision on behalf of their journal. This led to delays and flip-flopping on decisions. It also heightened the broader impression that some of these decisions were arbitrary, rather than being based in any sort of principled view about citation style. Those political dynamics, discussed more below, are pervasive and persistent.

In theory, each new edition of The Bluebook is a collaborative product of the four partner journals drafting changes, with Harvard then compiling them into a finished document. In practice, however, this is often not the case. This leads to sometimes hasty decisions or unilateral edits without collaboration because deadlines are approaching. It is a unique system among citation guides, and that unique system has unique flaws.

B. Politics

The larger problem with The Bluebook revision process, however, is the shifting political winds that often arbitrarily and contradictorily shape the book’s substance. Individual journals’ conceptions of the purpose of The Bluebook often conflict and shift over time. This Section details how some changes essentially boiled down to arbitrary timing and how individual editors’ views motivated idiosyncratic changes. At bottom, the shifting politics surrounding The Bluebook ’s purpose results in an unprincipled product.

The debate over the inclusion of Palestine in Table T10.3 is perhaps the most contentious example of the somewhat arbitrary nature in which editorial decisions are made (p. 344). Table T10.3 is supposed to encompass “Countries and Regions” (p. 343). However, it has expanded in a hodgepodge sort of way, adding countries and regions here and there, edition by edition. By the twenty-first edition, the table lacked any real guiding principle for determining when a country or region should be included.

Viewing part of the purpose of The Bluebook as promoting social justice, one journal proposed adding Palestine to Table T10.3. The editors from that journal felt that The Bluebook ought to have a hand in confronting social issues in the legal world. And as many individuals concerned about the conflict in Palestine pointed out, including Palestine in the table would have symbolic, legitimating value. Another journal, recognizing the symbolic value of including Palestine, worried that including it would signal that The Bluebook was taking sides in an ongoing conflict. Notably, prior editorial choices aimed at symbolic value had received criticism.¹⁹ Therein lay the problem: Without a principled approach to T10.3, the journals faced competing conceptions of whether this was a sufficiently important issue for The Bluebook to take a position on and whether the purposes of The Bluebook compelled inclusion of Palestine in the table.

So what did the editors do? The journal in favor of adding Palestine adopted the principle that Table T10.3 should include all nations that proclaimed themselves to be countries, including entities like the Luhansk People’s Republic and the Donetsk People’s Republic (which are nominally autonomous countries carved from Ukraine).²⁰ Meanwhile, the journal opposed to Palestine’s inclusion adopted the view that we should not make any changes to the table, even though that would mean leaving out new countries with international acceptance, like South Sudan.²¹ Again, the problem facing both journals was that the table was unprincipled. It was impossible to carve out a unifying rule, because the table does not have one. The journal in favor of inclusion could not justify Palestine’s inclusion without seeming overinclusive, and the journal opposed could not advance a rule that justified its exclusion without seeming underinclusive.²² Given the operating unanimity rule, we were at an impasse.

Eventually, one journal suggested redesigning Table T10.3 so that The Bluebook would only include countries and regions with an abbreviation and insert a disclaimer that any country omitted from the table should not be abbreviated (p. 340, tbl. T10). Initially, each journal agreed to this solution. Proponents of Palestine’s inclusion could accept that it wasn’t included because it did not have an abbreviation, while opponents could believe it wasn’t included because The Bluebook was not taking a stance on the issue. But make no mistake, this was a compromise born out of necessity—not any principled stance. There were two differing views on whether The Bluebook should take a stance on particular social debates, and the inability to satisfy both views shaped the new table.

But the story does not end there. Because the solution was a political compromise, shifting political winds reshaped the final product. After the edits had been compiled, but before I finalized the print version, the journal opposed to including Palestine—shortly after welcoming a new editorial board—informed us that it had changed its position. This set off a flurry of activity among the partner journals. Two journals had never taken an institutional position on the issue, so they held internal votes about their stances on the issue. As one might imagine, these votes had their own internal political elements;²³ but in the end, all four journals agreed to add Palestine.

This incident reveals how contingent some of the editing decisions are. Table T10.3 changed substantially as a result of a compromise on this issue. If none of the partner journals had originally objected to adding Palestine, we would not have removed all of the countries and regions without abbreviations. Likewise, Palestine was only added because the internal politics at the objecting school changed. Had those views not changed or had they changed a month later when it was too late to make further edits, Palestine would not be in The Bluebook. The politics at one school shifted at just the right time to trigger a domino effect resulting in a substantial change to Table T10.3.

But geopolitical issues were not the only points of contention. There were also some mundane issues that fostered a great deal of debate and led to arguably unsatisfying solutions reflecting The Bluebook ’s hubris. The prime example of this is the inclusion of the new “citation modified” parenthetical in the Bluepages (p. 9, R. B5.3). In 2017, Jack Metzler proposed a “cleaned up” parenthetical,²⁴ and over time it gained steam.²⁵ But Bluebook editors were divided on its inclusion. Some editors did not want to give the appearance that we were letting others dictate the rules to us, while others were worried if we did not make the change, The Bluebook would seem stuck in the past.

Again, this reflected competing conceptions of The Bluebook. On one view, if lawyers were using “cleaned up” parentheticals, then The Bluebook should provide guidance on how to use that parenthetical. Others viewed it as more prescriptive; if The Bluebook told lawyers to stop using “cleaned up,” they should and would stop. Eventually, the compromise position was to make “cleaned up” permissible for practitioners (the Bluepages) but impermissible for scholarship (the Whitepages).

But there was a final complication. One journal refused to use “cleaned up” as the actual parenthetical language. Based on a sour interaction with Jack Metzler, that journal did not want to use a term he coined. They also did not want it to seem like individual lawyers could dictate the terminology of citations to The Bluebook. They were willing to move forward with a similar parenthetical, but only if we used a different term. Thus, the “citation modified” parenthetical—with an express disavowal of the “cleaned up” parenthetical—was born (p. 9, R. B5.3).

What do these examples demonstrate about the revision process? First and foremost, it is shockingly arbitrary. We transformed Table T10.3 to avoid a divisive issue, only to reach a consensus at the last minute and take a stance on the issue we had been avoiding. At the same time, we kept the format for the transformed table. Thus, Table T10.3 now has a new format for essentially no reason. Second, the revision process is riddled with contradictions, which creates the same problem for The Bluebook. Why are the Falkland Islands included in Table T10.3 without issue, but including Palestine or South Sudan provokes a debate? And why does Guadeloupe (an overseas department of France) have an abbreviation in the table (p. 343, tbl. T10.3), but Mayotte and French Guiana (also overseas departments of France) do not? The fact of the matter is that allowing a small group of law students to shape the revision process results in fights about aspects of The Bluebook that are motivated primarily by politics, not principles. That unprincipled process, in turn, produces unprincipled contradictions in The Bluebook. Finally, the political nature of the revision process can result in inadequate compromises that reflect The Bluebook ’s overconfidence. The “citation modified” parenthetical neither seizes the existing currency of “cleaned up” nor rejects the underlying motivation behind “cleaned up.” Instead, it offers a stubborn half measure. It tells practitioners (but not scholars!) that they can clean up their quotes—but only on The Bluebook ’s terms. The decision to create a new term for this parenthetical rather than using the existing one demonstrates The Bluebook ’s hubris. We assume that, by indicating a new form in The Bluebook, everyone will follow its directions rather than sticking with “cleaned up.” And maybe they will. However, when The Bluebook editors act in this way, we also risk the chance that practitioners will simply ignore us. Therein lies the real risk of editorial hubris.

II. Fixing The Bluebook (and Law School)

A fair response to all I have said so far might be, “Well if you think the thing is broken, why didn’t you fix it?” My hope is that the explanation of the revision process demonstrated in part why some problems with The Bluebook might be impossible to fix. This Part focuses on barriers to fixing The Bluebook that stem from failures in legal education. First, there is the perennial debate over whether The Bluebook ought to be providing less guidance by way of rules and examples. Second, there is the question of how much The Bluebook should innovate. This Part examines each in turn, focusing first on how the problem manifests itself in The Bluebook and then tethering that problem to our legal education.

A. Fewer Rules?

Commentators critique each new edition of The Bluebook by noting its ever-expanding list of rules.²⁶ Indeed, each edition of The Bluebook has provided additional guidance.²⁷ As one professor put it, “The operating principle of [T]he Bluebook is that ‘NATURE ABHORRETH A VACUUM,’ so [T]he Bluebook has provided a way to cite every single source since the invention of papyrus.”²⁸ This prolixity of rules is coupled with an increasing number of examples on how to use the rules.²⁹ Thus, it has become easy and fashionable to argue that The Bluebook has “opted for an illusory completeness over practical realities” and therefore “begun to outgrow its usefulness.”³⁰

This critique is misplaced, however, for two reasons. First, The Bluebook ’s guidance (especially the Whitepages) must provide for a variety of sources that are rarely employed (especially in practice) but are not intuitive to cite. This Section deals with that response to the critique from Judge Posner and others.³¹ Second, and more concerningly, the growth of The Bluebook is in part a response to student (and practitioner) confusion over how to cite specific sources. The following Section deals with that point.

Consistent throughout Judge Posner’s critiques of The Bluebook is the idea that it provides too much guidance.³² In his view, “[e]fforts to impose uniformity beyond the basic conventions encounter rapidly diminishing returns.”³³ Rather than attempt to provide guidance for “every single source since the invention of papyrus,”³⁴ a citation manual should aim “to provide enough information about a reference to give the reader a general idea of its significance and whether it’s worth looking up, and to enable the reader to find the reference if he decides that he does want to look it up.”³⁵ In short, then, The Bluebook is already trying to do too much; it ought to provide general principles and allow authors to figure out the rest for themselves.

Judge Posner’s claim is correct to some extent, but his broader point misunderstands fundamental aspects of The Bluebook that explain its prolixity. There are three reasons why the “fewer rules” debate cannot be as easily settled as The Bluebook ’s critics might like.

First, even Judge Posner admits some expansion of The Bluebook is necessary “when new types of legal reference material emerge.”³⁶ This is true, but it is far from the only reason for adding citation rules. New rules are also needed when the existing guidelines are insufficient. An example is the addition of Rule 22 in the twenty-second edition (p. 245–49, R. 22). The need to cite tribal materials is not new, but feedback consistently noted complications surrounding the publication of tribal sources, which created inadequacies in the existing citation rules. Rule 22 adds to The Bluebook ’s length, but it also adds important clarity to a subset of existing materials that had simply been ignored in past editions.

Another notable phenomenon is the expanding breadth of legal scholarship. Judge Posner is somewhat incredulous that space in The Bluebook is devoted to Iraqi sources of law, for example.³⁷ But comparative and international law scholarship has exploded in recent years.³⁸ So what is someone writing a piece about Iraqi law supposed to do in Judge Posner’s world? Make it up?³⁹ The Bluebook should expand for new types of material, as Judge Posner suggests, but it should also expand to account for new areas of scholarship where prior guidance is inadequate. Judge Posner thinks that general principles are sufficient to fill those gaps, but the number of complaints and questions I received on a regular basis about citing certain sources (like tribal materials) suggests that it is not easy for individuals to construct new, consistent citation forms.

Second, Judge Posner’s general principles approach benefits from existing citation norms as well as the fact that his work primarily relies on well-trodden sources. Because there is a limited range of source types that judges and practitioners typically cite, much of The Bluebook seems gratuitous. These sources are the ones drilled into us in law school and solidified by repetition in practice. In other words, these sources are embedded in the legal culture, so they require less guidance. In fact, one reason why Judge Posner’s citation guide for his clerks is so short is because he does not have to waste time telling them things that we have absorbed through The Bluebook ’s citation culture. For example, his guide does not specify that the deciding court goes in the parenthetical with the date (unless the decision is by the U.S. Supreme Court) because The Bluebook has instilled that practice in us (p. 110, R. 10.4). His citations operate against a backdrop of shared principles that exist because The Bluebook has provided precise guidance on that point. Judge Posner is right that it should be possible to produce a much shorter citation guide that encompasses general principles for the most common sources for practicing lawyers—that’s called the Bluepages.⁴⁰ But he is wrong to assume that because he rarely or never uses some sources, those sources need no guidance.

Finally, even under a more “general principles” approach, some sources are just not intuitive. Without uniform guidance, Judge Posner’s twin goals of “provid[ing] enough information about a reference” and “enabl[ing] the reader to find the reference” are impossible.⁴¹ Take this citation to a blockchain transaction: 2.53 ETH, Ethereum, 0x087-a619a to 0x66f-1bce6, 0x1f159759e10d-9b2fbae08acbf42f85be45705847289d129414648db9f541244a (July 16, 2024, at 12:50 ET) (p. 203, R. 18.11.3(a)). Even if an author arrived at this citation form independently, a reader without reference to The Bluebook would have no easy way of intuiting what it means. The Bluebook ’s value (that Judge Posner misunderstands) is the guidance it provides for readers. Beyond helping authors determine what a citation needs to include, it also helps readers understand citations that lack intuitive formats.

In sum, the “too much guidance” critique misunderstands important aspects of The Bluebook. Although providing guidance for every possible source is neither possible nor valuable, a broader general principles approach is flawed for many reasons. As such, Judge Posner’s position is untenable for a citation guide for users other than practicing lawyers and judges.

There is a more fundamental problem that explains why The Bluebook ’s size cannot be reduced. Time and time again, the questions students and practitioners sent me about The Bluebook suggested law schools are doing an inadequate job teaching students how to extrapolate specific applications from broader rules. This results in unending pressure to add more guidance and examples so users can determine the proper citation format.

The Bluebook ’s critics believe it is possible to “state procedures rather than answers” in a citation manual.⁴² In other words, have users employ traditional legal reasoning rather than try to arrive at uniform guidance.⁴³ My experience running The Bluebook ’s questions and suggestions email led me to the opposite conclusion. To demonstrate, here’s a portion of one email I received:

I noticed in the abbreviation chart . . . under T13, that the University of [City] Law Review does not possess a [B]luebook sanctioned abbreviation. I would humbly petition for the University of [City]’s inclusion in forthcoming edition, with the abbreviation ‘U. [City] L. Rev.’, as that is how the courts cite our Law Review in their written opinions.⁴⁴

This proposal’s problem is hopefully obvious. The proposed addition is already the proper form for the University of [City] Law Review (p. 346, tbl. T13). There is no actual revision needed. How could the editor in chief of a well-regarded law review miss this? Without basic competence in legal reasoning skills, reducing the size of The Bluebook would be a futile task.

Extrapolating individual applications from general rules and prior examples is essentially the task The Bluebook asks of users. Legal reasoning asks something similar.⁴⁵ Just as the common law provides general principles announced in opinions and examples of the application of those principles through particular case outcomes, The Bluebook provides general rules and particular examples of those rules. So if one of the primary purposes of law school is to teach legal reasoning,⁴⁶ students should be capable of using that skill to figure out proper citations.⁴⁷ Nevertheless, students regularly request more guidance and more examples because they cannot figure out how to cite particular sources. This means The Bluebook cannot move toward the more open system many of its critics would prefer.

Law schools may be doing a poor job of making the connection between legal reasoning and The Bluebook, which might explain why law school students (and graduates) struggle to synthesize existing guidance to fit their needs. On first impression, The Bluebook may seem like “an intricate set of rules that” is “tedious to learn” without an underlying usefulness.⁴⁸ But learning how to bluebook can reinforce the legal training law schools instill in doctrinal courses. As others have explained, “[T]he ability to note [citation] details can . . . serve as a foundation for learning to make the fine distinctions that are essential to any lawyer’s success.”⁴⁹ Distinguishing relevant facts between cases is essential for legal reasoning; law schools should emphasize that the same skills are necessary for distinguishing proper citation forms. Additionally, learning how to deploy the proper introductory signal is recognized as a valuable tool even among The Bluebook ’s critics.⁵⁰ Finally, The Bluebook functions as a practice in statutory interpretation for students.⁵¹ There are textual commands (the rules) and precedents (the examples) that students must read in conjunction with legal citation’s overarching purpose to determine the proper outcome, just as the students would for any statutory scheme. Thus, schools should be emphasizing that The Bluebook and citations are not just tools for expressing legal reasoning—they are an exercise in legal reasoning itself.

In a perfect world, The Bluebook would be able to embrace Judge Posner’s slimmed-down guidance. The current state of affairs, however, is not conducive to such a system. As a result, The Bluebook faces an unending push to add further guidance, contributing to its ballooning size.

B. More Changes?

The other frequent set of complaints surrounding The Bluebook ’s rules is that each new edition makes needless changes or fails to make necessary changes.⁵² Thus, The Bluebook editors must constantly make decisions about the value of making or refusing to make particular changes. This Section explores the Scylla and Charybdis that editors attempt to sail through when deciding what changes to make. On the one hand, some changes are necessary and make sense. On the other hand, each change that we make increases the likelihood that practicing lawyers will disregard The Bluebook on an increasing number of issues. Each new edition must balance these risks, which can lead to disappointing results for users.

Start with the risks of making too few changes. The most obvious problem for The Bluebook editors is that without any changes, no one will buy the new edition.⁵³ Furthermore, making too few changes risks undermining The Bluebook ’s push toward uniformity. Finally, some changes might have symbolic value without causing too much disruption. The “enslaved party” parenthetical has faced its fair share of critics on the merits, but the actual learning costs of the change are marginal.⁵⁴ Thus, some degree of change is necessary and useful.

On the flip side, too many changes “would undermine the uniformity advantage of The Bluebook over competing form books.”⁵⁵ It is easy for editors to fall into the trap of believing that everyone will follow our changes because The Bluebook commands it. In truth, however, each change risks more users giving up on The Bluebook and doing things according to their own preferences.

Each proposed change embodies these potential tradeoffs. For example, one proposal we received during the revision process was to eliminate the “supra” form in the Whitepages for consecutively paginated periodicals (p. 85–86, R. 4.2(a)) and replace it with a short cite similar to case forms. So instead of “Posner, supra note 4, at 860,” the short form would now be “Posner, 120 Yale L.J. at 860.” The thrust of the proposal was that it would be easier at footnote one hundred to figure out where to find the source rather than going back to footnote four to find the full citation.

Ultimately, we rejected the proposal, but it was a close call. We would be uprooting what had been the standard short form for these periodicals since The Bluebook began.⁵⁶ Such a disruption to the way of doing things would likely trigger resistance among scholars who have understandably grown accustomed to the “supra” form. It was this fear that users would disregard The Bluebook ’s new guidance that significantly constrained our decisionmaking. Thus, the nature of the changes each edition can make is necessarily constrained by the path dependence of existing practice.⁵⁷ As a result, users are often left feeling that the changes we make do not actually address some of the underlying problems with The Bluebook or help simplify its rules toward greater uniformity.

Why worry that some users will simply disregard The Bluebook? The worry comes from an understanding of practical considerations and the educational culture surrounding legal citations. This is a problem once again rooted in law schools and how we teach students about citations.

Legal education (and legal culture more generally) is necessarily wedded, to a degree, to past practice by the nature of our legal system.⁵⁸ At the same time, the point of legal education is, in part, to prepare students to react to changes in the law. Law school provides a baseline understanding of, say, constitutional law, and then students incorporate developments in doctrine into their knowledge as the law changes.

Legal education, however, tends to treat The Bluebook differently. It is drilled into students early in their 1L experience, but it never really returns to the curriculum after that.⁵⁹ By only emphasizing The Bluebook during 1L, legal education treats it unlike other aspects of the law, essentially telling students their first-year experience with The Bluebook was enough.⁶⁰ This freezes lawyers’ understanding of The Bluebook at their 1L year. Some students—namely, law review members—will continue to engage with The Bluebook on a regular basis post-1L. These students will be aware of changes, but, otherwise, students have no real reason to update their baseline knowledge of The Bluebook if it is good enough to get by in practice.

There are practical considerations that also explain why practitioners generally stay wedded to The Bluebook as it existed when they were 1Ls. There are opportunity costs to remaining up to date on changes to The Bluebook, and unlike changes in doctrine, there is very little chance that a client’s success hinges upon new Bluebook rules. Relatedly, there is very little enforcement of The Bluebook rules in practice. In egregious cases a filing might be rejected,⁶¹ but attorneys usually have the flexibility to deviate from The Bluebook in two respects. They can refuse to update their practices even as The Bluebook evolves, and they can also intentionally depart from The Bluebook where they think they have a better way of doing things. As a result, most attorneys abide by a slightly modified version of The Bluebook that looks very similar to The Bluebook circa their 1L year.

For Bluebook editors, this means that we cannot be sure any changes we make will be accepted. So long as law schools maintain a somewhat flippant attitude toward legal citations after 1L, most lawyers’ conception of the rules will remain petrified in its 1L state. Trapped in this amber, The Bluebook struggles to evolve in ways that its users would like. At the same time, the more The Bluebook fails to adapt, the more likely users are to cite according to their vision of what makes sense. This risks a vicious cycle. The Bluebook must walk a tightrope between radical change that will not be adopted by users and mere superficial change that will leave users unsatisfied. No matter how it completes this balancing act, there will be those on both sides who are disappointed.

* * *

In short, fixing The Bluebook is not as easy as its critics often make it out to be. There are problems internal to The Bluebook itself that preclude many changes critics might like to see. What more frequently goes ignored, however, is how these issues are tied to broader problems in legal education. So long as those problems persist, many of The Bluebook ’s unsatisfying compromises and half measures will remain.

III. The Purpose of The Bluebook (and Law School)

The prior Part outlined some of the practical difficulties with fixing The Bluebook, but as previously discussed, many of The Bluebook ’s problems during the revision process flow not just from practical difficulties but from competing conceptions of The Bluebook ’s purpose.⁶² This Part discusses three potential notions of The Bluebook ’s role. The first is a prescriptive or justice-based purpose. Under this conception, The Bluebook should be moving legal citation principles toward certain ends that serve distinct goals. Alternatively, The Bluebook ’s role might be to describe the current state of legal citation and fill in gaps where necessary. Finally, we can understand the role of The Bluebook as establishing focal points. Drawing on coordination principles from game theory, this focal points conception seeks to provide common ground for the profession so that citations are usable for authors and readers alike.⁶³

These differing purposes reflect competing conceptions of the purpose of law school and legal scholarship. Thus, each Section of this Part explains how each purpose maps onto a parallel understanding of the role of legal education. The fact that The Bluebook (like legal academia) attempts to be too many things to too many people ensures that no one will ever be satisfied with it completely.

A. Justice

The first and most common conception of the purpose of The Bluebook and legal academia today is a prescriptive one. The Bluebook and law schools have long been accused of pushing liberal social justice ends.⁶⁴ And with respect to The Bluebook, some editors and commentators see the advancement of social justice as the goal.⁶⁵ Within this conception of The Bluebook, its rules should not reflect current citation practices—the rules should reflect how citation practices should be.

There are numerous examples of this phenomenon within The Bluebook. The “enslaved party” parenthetical was a response to scholarship pointing out the “serious dignitary harms” that citations to slave cases inflict.⁶⁶ Likewise, editors’ desire to do something symbolic with respect to the war in Gaza motivated the push for Palestine’s inclusion in Table T10.3.⁶⁷ And finally, the inclusion of a new rule for tribal materials was in part an attempt to legitimate legal systems that many have ignored and a response to the concern that not including guidance for tribal materials was a form of “othering” tribes.⁶⁸ On numerous occasions, then, The Bluebook has sought what editors deemed the normatively correct outcome. In doing so, its editors adopted a social justice purpose for The Bluebook.

This approach resides in the same vein as what many academics see as the purpose of legal education. For proponents of this view, law schools should focus on how law and society ought to operate, even if they do not operate that way in practice.⁶⁹ Thus, the legal curriculum ought to focus “on justice, equality, and access to legal services” above pure doctrine.⁷⁰ And this view of legal training flows over into the purpose of legal academia more broadly. On this view, legal academics should focus on “the type of scholarship that says ‘the law is x but it ought to be y.’ ”⁷¹ The purpose of scholarship is to move the law toward some ideal, not merely describe it.⁷² To be clear, this purpose can be embraced by a variety of different conceptions of social justice—it just happens that most of the scholarship skews left because most law professors hold liberal or progressive views.⁷³ Regardless of the exact conception of justice, this vision of legal academia as part of a reform project expresses itself frequently in The Bluebook. Editors who are influenced by the legal culture that surrounds them take the prescriptive approach to The Bluebook that many professors take to teaching and scholarship.

B. Description

The converse to the prescriptive purpose is the descriptive one. On this understanding of The Bluebook and legal education, the content in both should reflect the current state of the legal profession. To be sure, most of the trends in legal citation are endogenous to The Bluebook, meaning that The Bluebook drives the changes,⁷⁴ but there are notable exceptions. The question then becomes whether it is the role of The Bluebook to incorporate those changes to reflect external trends.

The most obvious example of this in the twenty-second edition is the “citation modified” parenthetical.⁷⁵ Faced with the fact that lawyers were already adopting “cleaned up,” The Bluebook editors felt pressure to respond. There was a sense that The Bluebook needed to describe through its guidance what had become a trend in legal citations. Of course, if The Bluebook was supposed to be purely prescriptive, there would be no need to respond to the prevalence of “cleaned up.” So long as it was forbidden by The Bluebook, we would expect no one to use it. But The Bluebook does not work that way. It must reflect at least a close approximation of ongoing citation practices to remain relevant. This fact illustrates The Bluebook ’s descriptive purpose. As legal culture changes, we want The Bluebook to describe these changes. The advent of generative AI, for example, required changes to Rule 18 (p. 191, R. 18.3). These changes are not value judgments about the use of generative AI in legal scholarship; they are judgments that legal scholars need a way to cite these sources. In such situations, The Bluebook ’s purpose is to describe how to do just that.

This descriptive understanding of The Bluebook parallels the descriptive purpose of legal academia. From the beginning, some legal academics have regarded the study of law as a scientific one, focused on describing the state of the law.⁷⁶ For professors of this strand, law school is designed to produce so-called “practice ready lawyers” by teaching students what the law currently is and how to analyze it.⁷⁷ So too for legal scholarship. “Legal scholars could set about the task of correctly stating what the law IS. The aim of such work would be to state the law correctly, using the traditional doctrinal methods of law . . . .”⁷⁸ To be sure, this scholarship can still influence the law; however, its primary focus is to describe existing law, not move the law in one direction or another.⁷⁹ While it may not jump out to readers as obviously as the changes made on the prescriptive view, this approach to legal education and scholarship is present within The Bluebook as well.

C. Focal Points

There is a third potential purpose for The Bluebook (and law schools): They are trying to establish focal points for the profession. Focal points are “a strategy profile that is salient for both players and a Nash equilibrium. That is, a focal point is mutually salient and a mutual best-response.”⁸⁰ In the context of legal citations, having focal points is valuable because it does not really matter if book titles are in small caps and article titles are in italics or vice versa. But, easily identifying if a work is a book or article is only possible if everyone places book titles in small caps or italics. Thus, The Bluebook ’s guidance acts as a focal point;⁸¹ it makes the choice that book titles will be in small caps so that the profession has a point of commonality.⁸²

The Bluebook usually embraces a focal points purpose when it rejects change. For example, there is no real need for “Id.” to be italicized, but The Bluebook will never move away from italicizing it. Why? The italicized “Id.” is a focal point, and shifting away from it would incur costs in disrupting that focal point. Thus, to the extent that The Bluebook ’s editors see its value as establishing focal points (so that lawyers have a way to cite nonintuitive sources, like blockchain transactions⁸³), they will resist changes to well-established formats regardless of how cumbersome or nonuniform they might be.

In many ways, law schools serve as a focal point for the profession as well. Law schools decide which areas of law should be inculcated in the next generation of lawyers. In making curriculum choices, each law school establishes focal points for the next generation of lawyers. Judges and lawyers can speak the language of contract to each other with relative ease, so they resort to that language over less well-covered claims, like quantum meruit or unjust enrichment.⁸⁴ But if we all took a one-semester course on restitution during our first semester of law school and spent only one week on breach of contract during a course on remedies, we might all talk to each other in the language of unjust enrichment. Curricula, like citations, can change over time. But most curricular changes reflect subtle shifts that are already occurring.⁸⁵ Thus, there is good reason to understand part of law school’s purpose as establishing focal points for students. The Bluebook serves a similar function in its own realm.

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There are aspects of The Bluebook and law school that embody all three of these purposes. So long as that’s true, critics will claim that The Bluebook (or legal education) is not fulfilling its purpose. But when you hear this, stop and ask: “Which purpose?” The Bluebook, although a battleground for these competing purposes, is not the site of the ultimate war. That fight takes place in the scholarship and classrooms of professors every day. As long as that fight continues to rage, The Bluebook will be contested along the contours of these debates about purpose. Without a clearer consciousness of the multiple purposes at play, those competing urges will remain unsatiated.

In sum, if one looks at The Bluebook with just one purpose in mind, many of the editorial choices may seem arbitrary, contradictory, or full of hubris. Recognizing that some choices are made to reflect value judgments, others to reflect current practices, and still others to reflect points of agreement that serve a unifying function allows for a full and holistic understanding of The Bluebook ’s editorial choices. These competing values conflict, so when one wins out in one situation and another wins out in another, the choices can appear almost random. Because The Bluebook cannot neatly resolve these value debates, the final product suffers.

Conclusion

“I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.”⁸⁶ This Review has also not sought to praise The Bluebook. But it has sought to bury some of The Bluebook ’s criticisms. The Bluebook ’s revision process is flawed and accounts for many of its problems. However, even a perfect revision process could not correct some of the underlying problems and tensions in legal academia. These underlying contradictions spill into The Bluebook, meaning The Bluebook cannot be everything everyone wants it to be. Blaming The Bluebook for facing conflicting preferences misses the broader legal educational culture surrounding any citation style. So we need not praise The Bluebook. Its faults remain manifold. But we ought to bury some of its criticisms for the time being by recognizing that what we think are flaws with The Bluebook are really larger problems with legal education. Only then can we get to heart of what is wrong with legal citation.

* Law clerk to the Hon. Chad Readler, United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. I owe many thanks to James Chen, Varsha Midha, Nitin Rao, and Stephen Sachs for shaping my thinking about this subject. All views are my own.