Monday 2 February 2009

Legal citation

The Irish legal blogger cearta.ie has a post in which he discusses various legal citation standards. He looks at the various legal citation formats in the English-speaking world including the Oxford Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities (OSCOLA) used in the UK, the Australian Guide to Legal Citation and the bilingual English-French Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation . He has this to say about the Bluebook: "However, one citation system stands out, and this is one situation where you really can judge a book by its cover: the Standard System of American Legal Citation is universally called The Bluebook, because of the colour (or, I suppose, the color) of its cover. It was first published in 1926.. it is now in its eighteenth edition. I’m not a fan: it is clumsy and overly pedantic, premised as it is on the formalist Langellian conceit that there can be a rule for every possible citation occasion. Worse than that, quite frankly, it simply looks ugly on the page."

hat tip: Tom Bruce

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