Legal blog citation rant

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Marginal Revolution points to an NIH style guide that includes a section on how to cite to blogs in academic medical papers. They rightly criticize the superfluous “place of publication” component as irrelevant to online publications (and likely print materials, too). Well, I’ve been wrestling with the citation of blogs in legal academic publications recently because the paper I’m finishing up now (with over 200 footnotes) is partly on the topic of blogs themselves and so internet-source-heavy.

The 18th edition of The Bluebook, published in 2005, adds a new citation form for blogs. Past editions contained simply a citation form for web pages whether blog or not. The problem I’m having with the newfangled blog form is that it ignores that footnotes convey information in and of themselves apart from being a pointer to the source material. Trusting that an article from a respected legal journal has been vetted more or less adequately, I often just glance down at a footnote to see who said what, just to get a flavor for the source and never intending to go look it up. The new form for blogs makes this difficult. For example, if a blog has only one author, the form is like so:

Freedom to Tinker, http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/ (Oct. 17, 2007, 09:13 EST).

That is, you cite the title of the blog and the main URL and then just give the date and time of the post. It doesn’t tell you the name of the author, so if you don’t know any better you won’t know the above citation is to Prof. Ed Felten’s blog. Scanning the footnote quickly it’s of great value to know that it’s Prof. Felten who’s being cited. You also don’t know what the title of the blog entry is. Here’s the form for multi-author blgos:

Posting of James Gattuso to Technology Liberation Front, http://www.techliberation.com/ (Oct. 15, 2007, 16:27 EST).

While this tells you the author’s name, it doesn’t tell you the title of the post, which would likely give you a flavor of what the post is about. In this case it would be “New LECG Study Puts Cost of Unbundling at 30 Billion Euros.”

So, memo to the Bluebook editors: Why make it so complicated? Why not just author, title, blog title, date, and URL for the individual entry? It’s worked for newspapers for years. Blogs aren’t any different.

Oct 17, 2007 | 1 Comment | Tags: , , ,

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