UHLC Nota Bene

This week the new edition of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation arrived at the O'Quinn Law Library. Nearly 50 pages longer than 2010's 19th edition, the rules and structure are largely similar to previous editions, but some important changes have been made. Here are a few of the major revisions: Bluepages: The Bluepages (for non-academic citation) have been re-formatted to follow the same structure as the white pages (academic citation) and Bluetable BT2 includes revised jurisdiction-specific citation rules. Quotations, Rule 5.2(d)(i): No longer requires indication of the ommission of internal quotation marks. Short Forms of Cases, Rule 10.9(iii): Addition guidance provided for short forms of cites for slip opinions. Administrative & Executive Materials, Rule 14: Rule 14.2(b) has been expanded to include detailed information on citing comments to agencies. Rule 14.2(d) gives more detailed information on citing guidance documents. Rule 14....

If you are looking for a little help with your legal citations, you may want to take a look at the Cite-Checker app from Wolters Kluwer, which is part of the publisher’s popular Law in a Flash series. This app serves as a guide to the Bluebook, providing plain English explanations of the rules with examples.   It covers the rules for specific resources like cases, statutes, books, and law review articles as well as non-resource specific concepts such as the rules for quotations, punctuation, and short form citations.   The app contains 17 different sections covering various Bluebook rules and concepts and has a table of contents to help you find the information you need quickly. The app is available for Android and iOS devices and is only $2.99.   For more information and to download the app, visit the iTunes App Store or Google Play .

The editors of The Bluebook are starting to think about revisions for the upcoming 20 th edition and they are looking for suggestions from you!  They are currently soliciting feedback through a survey that will remain open until November 8, 2013.  As a bonus, completing the survey will enter you for a chance to win a Kindle Paperwhite e-reader or a free copy of the 20 th edition of The Bluebook with a two year subscription to the online version. If you would like more information about the the survey, visit The Bluebook website .  Or go directly to the survey here .

According to a recent press release , the editors of The Bluebook, A Uniform System of Citation , have chosen the Rulebook app , to exclusively publish The Bluebook for mobile devices. The app provides access to The Bluebook as well as current federal and state court rules and users can search all sources by words or phrases, bookmark, highlight or annotate text, and view multiple rules and authorities simultaneously. The app is currently available through the App Store and available for all Apple devices. It is free to download but access to The Bluebook will cost $39.99. The federal court rules and select authorities along with the rules and authorities for specific states including Texas are available on the Rulebook app for an extra fee.

In the last few months, I have posted about citations to Wikipedia in decisions from the federal courts of appeals and in decisions from federal district courts . Now, to complete the trilogy, I'd like to briefly report some statistics regarding Wikipedia citations in state court decisions. As of this writing, based upon an examination of search results performed using both lexis.com and Westlaw, there have so far been 214 decisions from the various state courts that cite to Wikipedia. (Decisions that merely mention Wikipedia, usually in the context of addressing a litigant's use of the website, were excluded.) Of those, 175 have been since 2007 , the cut-off used in the past postings, which stems from a report that was posted to the Wall Street Journal Law Blog . Before I go any further, I'd like to point out the limitations of this analysis. Although practically every federal decision since Wikipedia's release in 2002 is available through lexis.com and/or Westlaw,...

A month ago, this blog, like a few others, discussed a report from the Wall Street Journal 's Law Blog on federal appeals courts citing to Wikipedia . I thought it might be interesting to examine the federal district courts for citations to Wikipedia, but first a brief update: The Seventh Circuit Is At It Again! Since my last blog entry on this topic (dated April 28, 2012), the Seventh Circuit, which already led all circuits in number of decisions citing to Wikipedia (doubling the second place circuit, the Ninth, 34 to 17), has released four more decisions containing citations to Wikipedia! Two of the decisions were written by Chief Judge Easterbrook (who really needs to learn how to cite to Wikipedia (or have his clerks learn how to); here's an example of his masterful citation style: "The Wikipedia article 'Hip replacement' provides an overview of the components and procedures." Plumbers & Pipefitters Local Union 719 Pension Fund v. Zimmer Holdin...

A few days ago, I was alerted to a brief article that was posted to the Law News Now portion of the ABA Journal 's website (hat-tip to Mon Yin) regarding a report posted to the Wall Street Journal Law Blog that asked, " Which Federal Appeals Court Cites Wikipedia Most Often? " Since this is a topic near and dear to my heart, I decided to see if I could corroborate their findings. Sorry to get picky, but I did find some small mistakes (although the gist of the posting is still accurate). The Law Blog posting claims that they "only recorded those instances in which an appeals court used Wikipedia for its own purposes , rather than citing it secondarily through a lower court or a party’s pleading" (emphasis added). But it then charged the Seventh Circuit with "36 citations". In reality, their lexis.com* search retrieved 36 cases, but not all of them were citing to Wikipedia for the court's "own purposes". [*I'm not 100% sure they use...

On the Supreme Court of Texas Blog , Don Cruse, inspired by a presentation by Robert Dubose given at the Austin Bar Civil Appellate Lunch on the topic "Can I Cite Wikipedia ? The Ethics of Citing Online Information on Appeal", recently wrote a posting entitled "How to Cite to Wikipedia in Appellate Briefs" . One thing I especially liked about this posting was that Mr. Cruse correctly encourages his readers to use the Permalink that Wikipedia provides for each version of an article so the reader can link directly to the exact version of the article the author relied upon rather than the most current version one receives when using the generic article URL, if they're going to cite to Wikipedia. Unfortunately, he doesn't discourage his readers from actually citing to Wikipedia in briefs or discuss when citing to Wikipedia in briefs might be appropriate, nor does he actually explain where Mr. Dubose stands on this issue. But that's not exactly why I'm w...

The coming week, the Mid-America Association of Law Libraries (MAALL) and the Southwestern Association of Law Libraries (SWALL) will be having a joint meeting in Lawrence, KS . Several staff members of the O'Quinn Law Library will be attending this event and/or helped put it together: • Mon Yin Lung, our Associate Director, is also the current President of SWALL and, as such, co-chaired the Programs Committee. • Chris Dykes, one of our Reference/Research Librarians, was a co-coordinator for a two-part program entitled Navigating your Way through Legislative Research-A Six State Survey . • Emily Lawson, another of our Reference/Research Librarians, also served on the Programs Committee and will also be participating as a moderator and speaker in the two-part, six-state-survey program she co-coordinated with Chris. Finally, I will be presenting my program, The Bluebook , 19th ed.: Changes Every Legal Researcher Should Know , during which I will be discussing what I believe are the mo...

On the Tex Parte Blog , Angela Morris recently wrote about an impending hearing by the Texas Supreme Court to discuss the benefits and drawbacks of a PACER-like system for Texas courts . From an access-to-information standpoint, this would be a great development! Not only would it make accessing court documents much easier state-wide, but it would require the creation of "a centralized service". As anyone who has been following the debate over the creation of uniform (or neutral) citation standards should recognize, one of the largest obstacles to uniform citation is the lack in many states of a centralized body responsible for assigning sequential numbers to the opinions of that particular state's many courts. Thus, for example, in Texas, there is currently no body charged with assigning unique sequential opinion numbers to all of the opinions from the various Texas Courts of Appeals. (Of course, Texas could take a leap forward and utilize a neutral format similar to Lo...

In the Spring 2011 issue of Law Library Journal (Vol. 103, No. 2), an article by Horst Dippel, Professor Emeritus of British and American Studies at the University of Kassel in Germany, caught my eye. The Trap of Medium-Neutral Citation, or Why a Historical-Critical Edition of State Constitutions Is Necessary , 2011 Law Libr. J. 14, 103 Law Libr. J. 219 , is actually a very fascinating article that discusses the travails of researching historical state constitutions. However, there are two aspects of this article that bothered me. First was the misleading title: The Trap of Medium-Neutral Citation . Although I'm sure I would have read it eventually, the ominous title was what impelled me to read the article immediately upon receiving my copy. This title clearly implied that a main thesis (if not the main thesis) of the article was to be some kind of argument against medium-neutral citations, most likely emphasizing citations to state constitutions. Indeed, the abstract provided a...

In my recent article, "A Jester's Promenade: Citations to Wikipedia in Law Reviews, 2002-2008" (7 I/S - A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society , forthcoming 2011 ( draft available through SSRN )), I applauded the University of Pennsylvania Law Review for being the only Top 30 (at the time) student-edited law review not to have cited to Wikipedia. Considering the edition of the Bluebook current when I finished writing the piece generally frowned upon citing to websites, I had originally planned to point out that Penn was the only one of the compiling editors of the Bluebook not to have cited to Wikipedia. I ultimately decided against it for two reasons: 1) I thought it would be redundant considering that all of the compiling editors are also within the Top 30, and 2) because there are instances where Wikipedia should appropriately be cited (although that pains me to admit). The Bluebook is "[c]ompiled by the editors of the Columbia Law Review, th...

It's that time again. Every five years (give or take), a new edition of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation is published. On June 1st, the 19th edition of The Bluebook will officially be released (although the 19th edition can be accessed electronically right now at www.legalbluebook.com ). There is one change, however, that is generating quite a bit of buzz, and it's a doozy!! The new edition explicitly addresses, in Rule 18.7.3, that most-important question that has been on everyone's lips for the last several years: How to cite to a podcast! Really? Out of all the deficiencies with The Bluebook, all the ambiguities that should've been addressed editions ago, the most pressing matter worthy of the editors' attentions is citing to podcasts?! I don't know which is worse: That the editors took the time to create a specific rule for podcasts, or that that is the only change that people seem interested in! Granted, most of the other changes are just remodeli...

Need help figuring out how to cite a plurality opinion? Unsure about when to use a pincite? Authoritative guidance on these and other common Bluebook questions is now available online. The editors of the Bluebook have introduced Blue Tips , a collection of the most useful answers to questions posed by Bluebook users. The tips are organized by subjects such as cases, quotations, and signals. Bluebook users are encouraged to submit reasonable questions on subjects covered by the Bluebook to editor@legalbluebook.com. The answers to your questions may be formulated into new Blue Tips!

The RIPS Law Librarian Blog ( http://rips-sis.blogspot.com/ ) brought this to my attention: The Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School has developed a tool to help with legal research: The Legal Citation Finder Bookmarklet (or LII Citer ), available at http://topics.law.cornell.edu/lii/citer . Once the LII Citer is saved as a bookmark, when you come across a citation on a webpage that is not hyperlinked to the text of the document, you can highlight the text and then click on the LII Citer in your bookmarks list. It should take you to the text you're looking for. At this time, not all citations are supported, and those that are supported are limited to federal materials. The LII webpage provides additional information, and even provides sample citations for you to test it out on. I'll bet an app for you phone won't be far off!