2000 Steven D. Jamar - nonexclusive license to publish granted to Amazon.comFirst, a disclosure - I was a co-chair of the ALWD Citation Manual Oversight committee and so am not disinterested in the book.
In a hands-on competition between the ALWD Citation Manual and the Bluebook, the ALWD Citation Manual wins hands down. When you try to use each book (the "hands-on" test), the ALWD Citation Manual is simply incomparably superior to the BB.
About three years ago, the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD, variously pronounced "Al Wid" or "All Wood" (I personally prefer the latter)), an organization of more than 200 members representing approximately 150 law schools, undertook the ambitious project of developing and publishing a new legal citation manual. The years of work came to fruition when the ALWD Citation Manual was published. This book, prepared by professionals for professionals, will, I believe, eventually displace The Bluebook.
ALWD Citation Manual and the Bluebook
One of the guiding ideas for the new manual was that it would be, for the most part, a restatement of the rules of citation based on the citation form actually used by experts. As a result of this conservative approach, citation done in the ALWD format will be familiar to practitioners and scholars alike. There are a number of small changes, but the citations will be instantly understood by any lawyer who learned any one (or more) of the 16 different versions of citation promulgated by the 16 different editions of The Bluebook.
Because the learning (and unlearning) to be done is minimal, it will be easy to adapt to either system and to move between them. Those who know The Bluebook will be able to adapt to the ALWD Citation Manual easily; those who learn the ALWD Citation Manual will be able to conform ALWD-compliant work to Bluebook requirements with relatively little additional specialized learning, especially for practitioner documents.
A Teaching Tool
The ALWD Citation Manual is not merely a reference book; it is also a teaching book. The attention paid to making the book much easier to teach from and learn from will make it particularly attractive to those who teach legal citation. Key features furthering this aim are the explicit articulation of a general rule of citation, numerous user-friendly examples of citations of each type of work, and design features that facilitate ease of reading and parsing rules. The book features two color printing; "Sidebars" to explain matters related to citation that are not rules per se; and "Fast Formats," a collection of pages illustrating proper citation form for most types of works. This latter feature will be very useful for someone who knows the citation forms already but needs to double-check some detail. The "fast formats" will also provide students and teachers with a rich source of examples of the application of the rules.
ALWD is maintaining a Web site which will include a ALWD Citation Manual support page to provide answers to frequently asked questions and to update the Manual as needed.
Goals and Features of ALWD Citation Manual
ALWD had a number of aims in creating this citation manual: to simplify some of the rules, to reduce inconsistencies, to make the rules responsive to the needs of lawyers as well as scholars, and, over the long term, to provide stability and uniformity of citation rules.
Among the simplifications, two stand out most prominently. First, how you cite a source does not depend on where you cite it. Gone are the arcane differences that depended upon whether the case was cited in a brief to the court, in a footnote to the text in an academic journal, or in the text proper of a law review article. The citation form in each setting is now the same.
The second major simplification is the elimination of the use of small caps in citations. There are now only two type styles: italics and regular type. If the portion of the cite is not in italics (such as signals and titles), then it is to be in regular type. The ALWD Citation Manual contains a simple list of what to put in italics; everything not on the list is to be in regular type.
Providing stability and uniformity of citation over the long term is important so that the scholars of tomorrow can understand the citations of today. Stability of citation form will also mean that what law students learn today will not be obsolete five years out of school. These goals, seemingly inherent in the very underpinnings of a system of citation, do not appear to have been sufficiently appreciated by the publishers of The Bluebook. Even as these goals were paid lipservice-the subtitle of The Bluebook is "A Uniform System of Citation" after all-the achievement of both stability and uniformity has been frustrated by frequent changes in citation form wrought by the student publishers of The Bluebook over the years.
This is a laudable effort and should prove very helpful to lawyers now and in the future.
Disclosure: I am on a committee that promotes the ALWD Citation Manual. But I volunteered for the committee because the ALWD Manual is so good. Students who learn citation from the ALWD Manual will be fine because most of the concerns expressed by critics of the ALWD Manual are based on myths.Myth 1: Practicing lawyers know the Bluebook. Sorry, but most lawyers don't even own the current Bluebook. Most own the one they got in law school, whether that's the 13th, 14th, 15th, or 16th edition. We're now on the 17th edition. And even then, most lawyers cite according to what they vaguely recall from law school, or they get someone else to do the citations.
Myth 2: Judges require bluebook citation form. Wrong. Most courts DO NOT require Bluebook form. Instead, they require uniform and consistent citations. And most judges would not know Bluebook citations from ALWD Manual citations. The differences are so few and so minor.
Myth 3: Students who learn ALWD Manual form will be in trouble when they go to work on a journal and must use the Bluebook. I doubt it. They will know citation form better because they learned it from a readable, logical manual. What will happen is that they will become disgusted with the Bluebook once they see how poorly written it is.
