<p>The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation exemplifies hypertrophy in the
anthropological sense. It is a monstrous growth, remote from the functional
need for legal citation forms, that serves obscure needs of the legal culture and
its student subculture.
Many years ago I wrote a review of The Bluebook, then in its sixteenth
edition. My review was naïvely entitled Goodbye to the Bluebook. The
Bluebook was then a grotesque 255 pages long. It is now in its nineteenth
editionwhich is 511 pages long.
I made a number of specific criticisms of The Bluebook in that piece, and I
will not repeat them. I dont believe that any of them have been heeded, but I
am not certain, because, needless to say, I have not read the nineteenth edition.
I have dipped into it, much as one might dip ones toes in a pail of freezing
water. I am put in mind of Mr. Kurtzs dying words in Heart of DarknessThe
horror! The horror!and am tempted to end there.</p>
<p>The growth in the size and complexity of The Bluebook may also reflect the
reflex desire of every profession to convince the laity of the inscrutable rigor of
its methods. The essence of profession as a type of service provider is that it
employs esoteric methods that its customers must take on faith; it is on that
basis that a profession can claim such privileges as licensure requirements that
restrict entry and thus competition. But unlike the genuinely professional
methods used by the modern medical profession to diagnose and treat disease,
the core method of the lawyer and the judge is legal reasoning, and it lacks
scientific rigor; indeed, at its best, it is uncomfortably close to careful reading,
to rhetoric, and to common sense. An unconscious awareness of the limitations
of legal science drives the search for rigor into unlikely places, such as the
form of citations,1 and has given the profession a 511-page book that it does
not need. </p>
<p>A grim capitalist logic thus drives the malignant growth of The Bluebook.</p>