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Bluebook Citation

Bluebook Quick Reference

Rule 1.1:  Rule for Citation Sentences and Clauses in Law Reviews.

Rule 2:  Rule for Typefaces for Law Reviews.

Inside Cover:  Starting point for making law review citations.

Helpful Hints

  • See rule R16.7 and sub-rules for special citation forms, like student-written law review materials, unsigned materials, book reviews, symposia, colluquia, surveys, multipart articles, etc.
  • See rule R16.8 for law reviews from online sources.
  • See rule R16.9 for short citation forms for law reviews.
  • See rule R17 and sub-rules for unpublished and forthcoming sources.

The Basics

Citing for law review (notes, comments, book reviews, and full-length articles) will be different than citing sources in court documents and legal memoranda.  They differ in two major ways. One is that your citations will appear in footnotes and not in the text.  Secondly, the typeface conventions may differ.

  • Citation Placement:
    • Citations for law review articles appear in the footnotes, at the bottom of the page on which the corresponding text appears.
    • Rule 1.1 states the structure of footnotes should include:
      1. A superscript numeral (a "footnote call number") will appear in the body of the text after the sentence period.
      2. A corresponding call number will appear at the bottom of the page, followed by the citation sentence.  This will be a full sentence that begins with a capital letter and ends with a period.
  • Typeface:
    • When doing a law review article citation you only want to follow the whitepages rules of the Bluebook (unlike for court documents and memoranda, when you may refer to the bluepages for citation rules).
    • This means that you may have portions of the citation in large and small caps.

Citation Breakdown

Citation:

Anar Patel, Crime in the Evolved Digital Age, 20 J. Tech. L. & Pol'y 19 (2015).

Breakdown:

  • Author's full name (Anar Patel): See rules R16.2 and R15.1.
  • Title of article (Crime in the Evolved Digital Age): See rules R16.3 and R8 on capitalization.
  • Journal volume number (20): Look for the volume number of the journal in which your article is printed in the page headers of the article. See rule R16.4 on consecutively paginated journals.
  • Abbreviation of journal title (J. Tech. L. & Pol'y), See rule R16.4 and tables T10 and T13 for abbreviations.
  • Page on which the article begins (19): Look at the page number on the first page of the article. See rule R16.4.
  • Year of publication (2015): Look for the year in page headers of the article or copyright information on the title page. See rule R16.4.