ZiefBrief

The *?$%! Bluebook

Let's face it.  The Bluebook can be a baffling, frustrating experience for first-time cite-checkers.  Our wise colleague, Mary Whisner, at the University of Washington's Gallagher Law Library, has a helpful essay in the Law Library Journal on Bluebook woes, "The Dreaded  Bluebook," which is a "must read" for anyone who has ever thrown a Bluebook against the wall in sheer frustration.  In this essay, Mary reveals one of the tips that I often recommend to newbie cite-checkers -- when in doubt about how to cite to a particular authority, use Lexis or Westlaw to search the footnotes of existing law review articles to find out how other editors are citing the authority. For example, if I need to figure out how to cite to a  Congressional Research Service report entitled, "Federal and State Laws Regarding Pharmacists Who Refuse to Dispense Contraceptives," I would search the JLR database on Westlaw or the ALLUS database on Lexis with the following search:

federal /2 state /5 pharmacists /2 refuse /2 dispense /2 contraceptives

From there, I can browse the footnotes of the articles appearing in my search results to see how editors are handling this CRS report citation.  Of course, as Mary notes, you may find that different law reviews cite the authority in different ways, but you can usually decide which conforms most closely to the Bluebook rules and go from there. 

The most important point made in Mary's essay is this -- don't be afraid to ask the law librarians for help with the Bluebook's rules.  Some of us have toiled as student editors ourselves, and we have lots of arcane Bluebook knowledge that we would love to put to good use!

Presentation on Cite-Checking Basics

We recently presented a few basic tips for law review and journal members who are getting started with cite-checking, and you can find the presentation here: Download journalcitechecking.ppt

Helpful Roundup of Law Review Submission Resources

Concurring Opinions has a nice post summarizing some of the online resources for scholars submitting articles to law reviews.  Included are links to online guides to article length restrictions, law review contact info, law review ranking info, and electronic submissions. 

Kudos to USF IP Publication for Net Neutrality Symposium

As the Internet becomes the major commercial thoroughfare for the American economy and Web 2.0 applications place greater demands on bandwidth, the issue of Net Neutrality is going to become more and more important. For those readers who have been living under a virtual rock, Net Neutrality refers to the struggle between proponents of a “free” Internet who favor unlimited access versus those who for reasons of maximizing profit or efficiency want to limit (or charge for) access to the Information Superhighway.

With this conflict in mind, the University of San Francisco Intellectual Property Law Bulletin recently presented  The Toll Roads? The Legal and Political Debate Over Net Neutrality.
The event generated positive publicity prior to the event in the pages of the SF Chronicle.

Though the shouting is over and the dust has settled there is still useful information to be found on the web site created to promote the event. Check out a useful collection of statements and papers from the seminar participants are available on the web site.

As a follow-up, the San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that the Senate Commerce Committee will be hearing from consumer advocates, Internet Service Providers and other concerned parties in a series of hearing beginning today.

New Empirical Legal Studies Bibliography

Researchers who are looking for law-related scholarly articles containing substantive empirical studies -- you're in luck!  The Empirical Legal Studies Bibliography is now open for business.  From the Law Librarian Blog (Dec. 5, 2007):

"Not officially launched, but now live is the fabulous Empirical Legal Studies Bibliography. A joint product of UCLA and Cornell law schools (with much of the indexing and literature review to create the database done by librarians at those two schools, namely Matt Morrison, Jill Fukunaga, and June Kim), users can search for ELS articles by author, title, subject, or year.  For those of us who have grappled with requests for ELS articles in a particular subject, we know how difficult these projects can be.  This new product is much needed and provides an important service in this expanding area of legal scholarship."

For a detailed description of the database, click here.

Research Epiphanies

Belle Lettre, who blogs at Law and Letters, has a thoughtful post on her research experiences and the importance of libraries.  She notes that online databases like Lexis, Westlaw, and JSTOR are "not so awesome" and that she's rediscovered the efficiency and usefulness of print resources over the past few months.  Her post reminds me of my "Golden Rule of Research":  if you're searching for particular information, and you don't find what you're looking for within 10-20 minutes in the resource that you're using, it's time to switch research strategies and try something new. Clients hate it when new attorneys rack up lots of billable hours on research that should have taken an hour or two, so it's a good idea to get into the habit of stopping yourself when you're spinning your wheels.  If you have no idea where you should look next, ask a librarian!  We can suggest some alternative research strategies and try them out for you to see if they work. 

Law Profs and Law Review Editors Rumble Again

It seems like Daniel Solove of Concurring Opinions feels compelled to pen at least one snarky post about student-run law reviews each semester (see our earlier post for another example), and his latest contribution is entitled "A Sample Law Review Submission Policy."  Here are some fun excerpts:

In considering your article, we use an objective point system for assessing scholarly quality. Articles receiving over 100 points are generally accepted. Here is how it works:

1. Are you from a highly-ranked law school?  If yes, add 20.

2. Have you published in highly-ranked law reviews?  If yes, add 30.

3. Is your name Cass Sunstein?  If yes, accept immediately.

4. Does your article have a nifty title?  If yes, add 10.

5. Is the introduction good?  If yes, add 40.

6. Do the footnotes need a lot of editing?  If yes, subtract 50.

7. Does your article have more than 6 parts?  If yes, subtract 10.

  Not to be outdone, a former editor returned fire in the comments with this list of questions:

Are you that insufferably self-important professor from our faculty who made our life miserable 2 years ago when we made the mistake of publishing his article? If yes, multiply by zero.

Does your article reflect that you think "empirical study" means "counting things"?  If yes, subtract 20.

Are you Jennifer Lopez with tenure and elbow patches? That is, will you constantly pester us with capricious requests? Will you ask us to speak to your research assistants, will you drop by the office, will you--instead of accepting or rejecting our proposed changes--want to discuss them all in excruciating detail? If so, and if we can detect it in time, subtract 15. Subtract only 5 if your article has any redeeming qualities.

Most entertaining!  And thank you, former editor, for also drawing attention to the overuse of the Humpty-Dumpty quote from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass.  A quick Westlaw search reveals 219 uses of this quotation in United States law review and journal articles, and that is just too many!

Law Professor Blogs Are Flourishing

Concurring Opinions has posted its 2007 Law Professor Blogger Census.  According to Professor Solove, there are now 307 blogging law professors, and the range of topics is quite impressive.  Law professors are blogging about aviation law, reproductive rights, poverty law, sports law, consumer law, .....well, you get the idea!  If you're interested in a particular practice area, these blogs are a great way to keep current on the latest developments and find paper topics that won't put you to sleep. 

Online Companions to Law Reviews

Most of us have heard of Yale Law Journal's Pocket Part and Harvard Law Review's Forum.  But did you know about Texas Law Review's See Also or Connecticut Law Review's CONNtemplations?  Ken Strutin has compiled a very handy list on LLRX of all of the law reviews that have created some sort of online forum that allows for debate and discussion of the articles published by the law reviews.  These websites can be great resources for students who are researching note or law school paper topics. 

Pin Cite Smackdown

Concurring Opinions penned a long post that is critical of the Bluebook rules for pin cites.  Daniel Solove argues:

I believe pin cites are important for direct quotations or for difficult-to-find facts in sources. But they are often unnecessary for many facts or for holdings of cases. What annoys authors is that instead of working on improving the substantive arguments and writing of an article, a ton of time is wasted hunting for pin cites that few readers will care about.

Pretty uncontroversial issue, right?  Think again!  The post drew the attention (and ire) of some current and former law review editors, and they quickly weighed in with their own opinions about the citation abilities (or lack thereof) of legal scholars and law professors.  One former law review editor unleashed this opinion:

My disagreement with you lies in the willingness to give the authors' statements presumptive validity. Having personally seen many respected authors attempt to blow a fast one past the editors (and, consequently, the readers), I'm defending the requirement for more precision. And I am doing so not as an editor who wanted to Bluebook the article to perfection. I didn't. I'm defending the precision (namely, the use of pin cites) for the readers' sake.

Many readers are fooled by the authors into thinking that their articles are novel and insightful. The authors do so by making statements of the following form: "Many scholars in the field argue X. Shockingly, no one has paid sufficient attention to Y. I am going to argue Y and show how brilliant I am." Often, the authors want to omit a citation for the first proposition--that many scholars argue X. Their reasoning mirrors that in your response to my previous post, that the statement should be obvious to anyone well-versed in the field. Well, not necessarily.

And there's more!  All in all, the post generated 33 lengthy comments from law professors and current and former editors, all fiercely defending or condemning the pin cite requirement. If you're cite-checking and need to take a break, this post and its comments should provide welcome comic relief from the tedium of cite-checking.