Judge Posners writes an article in the Yale Law Journal criticizing The Bluebook, and the Footnotes are not blue booked

January 25th, 2011

Seriously, Posner FTW.

Nowadays the word “hypertrophy” is used mainly to denote a class of diseases in which an organ grows to an abnormal size because of the uncontrolled growth of the cells that constitute it…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.

And the article isn’t blue booked!

I have asked the editors not to make my citations conform to The Bluebook, and they have graciously consented.

Just flip through the article. The footnotes are not blue booked, yet, somehow, all of my legal training and expertise have taught me to figure out what Posner is referring to. For example, Posner writes:

See, for example, John D. Cooney, “Egypt’s Pyramids,” 134 Science 936–938 (1961). Another example of archaeological hypertrophy is the terra cotta warriors of Qin Shi Huang. See Richard Stone, “Archaeologists Seek New Clues to the Riddle of Emperor Chin’s Terra- Cotta Army,” 325 Science 22 (2009).

Now, my powers of deduction figured out that rather than writing, “See e.g.”, he wrote “See, for example.” Those seem to be the same thing… I may need to consult with the editors of a few ivy league law school journals though to check.

H/T Paul Horwitz