The twentieth edition of The Bluebook<\/em><\/a> is out in time for\u00a0sale to a fresh crop of 1Ls. \u00a0This is the first of a series of posts that will explore how well that venerable\u00a0guide addresses the conceptual and practical issues faced by lawyers, judges, and law students whose legal research and writing take place in a predominantly\u00a0electronic environment. \u00a0Like the citation reference to which this blog is related<\/a>, the focus here will be on writing and citing in professional practice and not the norms that prevail in academic journal publication.<\/p>\n Once upon a time legal treatises were produced in print (and only in print) by a wide array of publishers.\u00a0 West Publishing was one of them, but many treatises had no\u00a0tie to a vendor of primary materials.\u00a0 Citation practice\u00a0made that possible.\u00a0 The purchaser of a treatise published by West Publishing Company could use it with statutes published by the Michie Co. or law reports published by Lawyers Cooperative Publishing.\u00a0 The same \u201cinteroperability\u201d enabled such companies as Little, Brown & Company, Warren, Gorham & Lamont, and Matthew Bender & Co. to publish highly successful treatises without having any involvement in the publication of primary authority. \u00a0Law libraries could and did mix and match.<\/p>\n During the final decades of the twentieth century, through a series of acquisitions,\u00a0Thomson Reuters, Reed Elsevier, and Wolters Kluwer gathered the works owned by\u00a0those publishers<\/a> into large treatise portfolios and placed them online. \u00a0While most treatises can still be purchased and sustained through updates in print\u00a0form, contemporary researchers are far more likely to encounter the likes of\u00a0Nimmer on Copyright<\/em>\u00a0or American Law of Zoning<\/em>\u00a0in electronic format. \u00a0In 2015 electronic format most likely means via the publisher’s online service, but not necessarily. \u00a0Treatises in ebook form<\/a> have begun to appear.<\/p>\n When a researcher identifies\u00a0a treatise passage she wishes to cite (in memorandum, brief, or opinion), should her\u00a0citation indicate in which of that treatise’s multiple versions (print, online database, or ebook) she has found it?<\/p>\n Here are two examples, one each drawn from the Westlaw and Lexis treatise collections.<\/p>\n A search on WestlawNext for the zoning treatment of \u201cadult\u201d businesses might well lead to the following passage, copied directly from that service together with what it\u00a0terms\u00a0\u201cstandard\u201d citation:<\/p>\n \u00a7 29:7. Place regulation: defining and zoning adult businesses<\/p>\n In the wake of Renton, regulations governing the places where adult businesses may operate have been widely adopted by governments at both the state and local levels. These regulations, which apply to a range of adult establishments, must comply with various limitations to ensure that they are constitutional \u201cplace\u201d regulations for protected speech.<\/p>\n 3 Am. Law. Zoning \u00a7 29:7 (5th ed.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n According to\u00a0Rule 15 of The Bluebook, <\/em>three items are\u00a0missing from\u00a0this “standard” citation provided by\u00a0Westlaw: the name of the author (currently, Patricia E. Salkin), the full title (American Law of Zoning<\/em>) and the date.<\/p>\n I see from the publisher’s web site that updates to the print version were\u00a0shipped in May 2015.\u00a0 The immediately previous update occurred in late 2014.\u00a0 Since the Cornell library does not have the fifth edition of this work, let alone its updates, in either print or in ebook form I must rely on\u00a0the online version.\u00a0 It\u00a0 reports “Database updated May 2015”.\u00a0 If I were to cite the passage as if working from print, I would add the author whose name is provided online above the section text, expand the abbreviated title to full, and add a date, producing the following:<\/p>\n 3 Patricia E. Salkin, American Law of Zoning<\/em> \u00a7 29:7 (5th ed. 2014).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Because the print work is in looseleaf form and the updates come in the form of substitute pages, and I can see from the publisher\u2019s site that the May update did not include new material for \u00a7 29:7 it\u2019s not clear that I shouldn\u2019t instead use the year of the 5th edition\u2019s publication or that section\u2019s most recent revision. \u00a0The online version does\u00a0not furnish that information so I\u2019ll have to stick with \u201c2015\u201d.\u00a0 Or should it be \u201cMay 2015\u201d?<\/p>\n Back to The Bluebook<\/em>, despite\u00a0contemporary reality it seems to assume that I’ll be working from print. \u00a0I’ll not count the ways, but note that rules 15.1 and 15.3 refer to “the title page” and 15.9(c) speaks of the print version as being “authoritative”. \u00a0Rule 15.9 warns against treating the online version of a book as interchangeable with the print. \u00a0Rule 15(c) limits\u00a0citation of an ebook version to\u00a0works that are\u00a0only available in that form.<\/p>\n Well, the practical difficulty for this writer and most others is that although this treatise\u00a0is available to the world in three formats, I have feasible\u00a0access to but one. \u00a0Consequently, I can only cite to the Westlaw version. \u00a0Rule 15.9 suggests that in that case I should recast my citation\u00a0along these lines:<\/p>\n 3 Patricia E. Salkin, American Law of Zoning<\/em> \u00a7 29:7 (5th ed.), Westlaw (database updated May 2015).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n If\u00a0I, instead, had\u00a0only\u00a0the ebook version to work from, Rule 15.9(c)\u00a0instructs that I\u00a0report that by means of an\u00a0“ebook” parenthetical.<\/p>\n A LexisAdvance search on the same zoning topic leads to a paragraph that Lexis\u00a0suggests should be cited as:<\/p>\n 2-11 Zoning and Land Use Controls \u00a7 11.03<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The proposed citation contains no author, edition, or date.<\/p>\n Using the online table of contents to climb back to the top matter of the work, I find both “Author(s)” and\u00a0“Cite As” pages. \u00a0The latter proposes that I cite this material in the following format:<\/p>\n Zoning and Land Use Controls, Ch. no., Title, \u00a7\u2009(LexisNexis Matthew Bender).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The former lists two authors: Patrick J. Rohan and Eric Damian Kelly.<\/p>\n The text I would cite shows a 2015 copyright notice and indicates\u00a0by footnote that its text was the subject of a major revision by “General Editor, Eric Damian Kelly” in 2003.<\/p>\n I know that Dean Rohan died in 2009. \u00a0A search for Eric Damian Kelly leads me to\u00a0Ball State University, where he\u00a0is listed on the urban planning\u00a0faculty. \u00a0Kelly’s CV describes his role with Zoning and Land Use Controls<\/em> as “General Editor”. \u00a0It’s not clear exactly what that means; perhaps that the treatise\u00a0is being\u00a0maintained by Matthew Bender editorial staff under Professor Kelly’s general supervision.<\/p>\n It is from such\u00a0data scraps that one\u00a0must construct a citation. \u00a0As with American Law of Zoning<\/em>\u00a0I have no access to either the print or ebook version of this treatise, no idea what they display on their respective title pages.<\/p>\n Doing my best to apply The Bluebook<\/em>‘s practitioner rules to this treatise section\u00a0I would cite it:<\/p>\n 2 Zoning and Land Use Controls<\/em> \u00a7 11.03 (Eric Damian Kelly ed., 2015).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n However, I confess to uncertainty whether this is the sort of editor role to which Rule 15.2 is addressed. \u00a0And there is, again, the question of whether\u00a0the database, “Lexis” in this instance, shouldn’t be noted.<\/p>\n Examination of a sizable\u00a0sample of recent judges’ opinions and lawyers’ briefs that cite\u00a0treatises yields these conclusions:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Introduction The twentieth edition of The Bluebook is out in time for\u00a0sale to a fresh crop of 1Ls. \u00a0This is the first of a series of posts that will explore how well that venerable\u00a0guide addresses the conceptual and practical issues faced by lawyers, judges, and law students whose legal research and writing take place in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,23],"tags":[34,33,24],"class_list":["post-384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bluebook","category-treatises","tag-bluebook","tag-ebooks","tag-treatises-2"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citeblog.access-to-law.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citeblog.access-to-law.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citeblog.access-to-law.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citeblog.access-to-law.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citeblog.access-to-law.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=384"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/citeblog.access-to-law.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":403,"href":"https:\/\/citeblog.access-to-law.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384\/revisions\/403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citeblog.access-to-law.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citeblog.access-to-law.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citeblog.access-to-law.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Where Have All the Treatises Gone?<\/h2>\n
The Resulting Citation Challenges<\/h2>\n
1) From a Thomson Reuters treatise<\/h3>\n
2) From a title owned by Reed Elsevier<\/h3>\n
How Real Lawyers and Judges Do It<\/h2>\n
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