Legal blog citation rant

Thanks for visiting this blog for the first time. Check out the home page for the most recent posts, or the archives if you're looking for something in particular. Here are some of our favorite posts, which you might enjoy:

If you like what you see, we hope you'll consider subscribing to the RSS feed.

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: , , ,

Oh, the legal cites they are a-changin’

A new research paper finds the top ten musicians cited in the legal literature. Bob Dylan takes the top spot with 186 citations, followed by The Beatles and Bruce Springsteen. The author confesses, “I never asked anyone why they do it, but I think it is because it is fun to do and they’re bored.” I can attest to that. I always try to title my law review articles after 80s songs or lyrics (”Relax, Don’t Do It: Why RFID Privacy Concerns Are Exaggerated and Legislation Is Premature,” “Video Killed the Franchise Star: The Consumer Cost of Cable Franchising and Policy Alternatives,” and the forthcoming, “Sending Out an S.O.S.: Public Safety Communications Interoperability as a Collective Action Problem.”) In my RFID paper I also cite Ice-T’s Don’t Hate the Playa to illustrate a point.

“Although [the study's author, Alex B. Long,] finds a few occasions when the lyrics work, Long mostly criticizes the use of lyrics because ‘legal writing is easy, comedy is hard.’ He cites many occasions when it feels like the author is stretching by using the lyrics or ‘reaching for a way to plug a favorite artist.’” Yeah, legal writing sure seems easy for him. Hat tip Bridget.

Nov 16, 2006 | Comments Off | Tags: , ,

  •  
  •