Justice Willett Corrects the Bluebook

I had enjoyed Texas State Supreme Justice Don Willett's tweets, and I had heard that he was a forensic badass, but I confess, I hadn't really seen any evidence of it until today, when he corrected the new edition of A Uniform System of Citation aka The Bluebook, the most common guide for how to cite sources in scholarly legal articles and court papers.

What I Learned from Reading the Thirteenth Edition of the Greenbook: Texas Rules of Form

The (University of) Texas Law Review Association published a new edition of the Greenbook: Texas Rules of Form-- the 13th this year. The Greenbook is a supplement to the Harvard Bluebook, superseding the Bluebook as to Texas law. I call it the Harvard Bluebook, but Columbia Law School, the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Yale Law School share in the work. I have no reason to believe that any influential group at any of these effete institutions cared about the subtleties of Texas law-- petition history, the military and semicolon courts, Los Siete Partidas, etc.
This edition of the Greenbook has a very helpful table of contents, and has gotten rid of many rules that were much more trouble to follow than they were worth.It updates historical data and has internal cross references and cross references to the Bluebook. It clarifies how to cite administrative material to the Texas Register.
What I learned:

1. It no longer offends the Bluebook not to cite to state-published official reporters of Texas cases which ceased publication at least 52 years ago and are increasingly hard to find.
2. The editors appear to believe that West's Texas Subsequent History Table is still being published. I've switched to checking online.
3. The case that discussed the precedential value of the various dispositions of the old Commission of Appeals is National Bank of Commerce v. Williams, 84 S.W.2d 691, 692 (Tex. 1935).
4. The case that discussed the precedential value of the Texas Supreme Court's adoption, affirmation or approval of judgments of the old Court of Appeals is McKenzie v. Withers, 306 S.W. 503 (Tex. 1918).
5. There are now official forms for the various records of an appeal.
6. The invaluable historical lawbook  H.P.N. Gammel's The Laws of Texas 1822-1897 is available on a free-to-the-public website maintained by the University of North Texas (There's a lot of other great historical stuff there with it, some legal, most not).
7. A law review article on the Commission of Appeals of the late 19th century (even older than that first Commission of Appeals I was telling you about) is Hans W. Baade, Chapters in the History of the Supreme Court of Texas: Reconstruction and Redemption (1866-1882), 40 St. Mary's L.J. 17 (2008).
8. The Texas Supreme Court posts its internal operating procedures on the clerk's website.
9. There's a new notation for Texas Supreme Court petitions that have been filed timely, and that the court has ordered briefing on the merits for "pet. pending."
10. Whoever the Texas Law Review Association hired to bind my copy of the book did it wrong, the back cover keeps falling off.

A bargain at $11.00. Get yours now.

New Harvard Bluebook Out

The 20th edition of the Harvard Bluebook is out. It's time to upgrade.

Practical Advice for Keeping Records of Your Records of Your Past Trials and Appeals

When I first started keeping records of my trials and appeals, I used Bluebook and Greenbook citation rules to format my records, but looking for work, prospective employers often wanted to know things I didn't have recorded- the given names of my clients and adversary parties, the exact dates cases were decided. Keep your records in a master list that includes those pieces of information and the results of the matters, so you don't have to remake the list a couple of times, as I have had to.

The Sneaky Extra Rule You Have to Remember Sometimes When You're Citing the Federal Fifth Circuit

Every part of the United States of America is served by a federal district court, and those-- in turn-- are served by federal circuit courts of appeals. Eleven of them are numbered. Each of those cover a geographical area.

First: Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Puerto Rico, and Rhode Island.
Second: Connecticut, New York, and Vermont.
Third: Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the Virgin Islands.
Fourth: Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia.
Fifth: Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.
Sixth: Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee.
Seventh: Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin.
Eighth: Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota.
Ninth: Alaska, Arizona, California, Territory of Guam, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Territory of the Northern Mariana Islands, Oregon, and Washington.
Tenth: Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wyoming.
Eleventh: Alabama, Florida, and Georgia.

There are two other I will save for a later post: the District of Columbia Circuit-- I know, it's kind of geographical-- and the Federal Circuit, which is the only geographically general content-specialized federal court of appeal.

So what's the special rule about the Fifth Circuit? It is Rule 10.8.2 of the Bluebook, A Uniform System of Citation. On October 1 1981, the Fifth Circuit was divided to create the new, smaller Fifth Circuit and an Eleventh Circuit.

So:

1. Cite decisions rendered in 1981 and labeled "5th Cir." by month.
2. Give unit information whenever possible (it seems the court began the transition by having a Fifth Circuit Unit A and a Fifth Circuit Unit B.
3. Designate as "Former 5th" any nonunit judgment labeled as a Former Fifth judgment and rendered after September 30, 1981.

Knowing this rule separates the appellate children from the appellate grown-ups. Although the other circuits have had coverage changes, this separation is the only one the Bluebook cares about.

Yale Librarian Claims that the Harvard Bluebook- the Handbook of Legal Citation- Started with Them.

Don't know if Yale is proudly claiming fatherhood or grudgingly admitting paternity of a bastard. Hat Tip to Josh Blackman of the quality epynonymous blog out of Houston.

Formally Citing a Federal Statute?- Check the United States Code, the 2012 Version.

A new edition of the United States Code started last year (The federal Government Printing Office basically does a new one every six years, and, in the interim, they put out supplements, like yearbooks added onto an old-fashioned printed encyclopedia.). The Bluebook says that the proper way to cite a federal statute is to cite it to the U.S.C. You're supposed to give the volume number and the date for the section you are citing. So, in the most formal legal writing situations, you have to look up every citation of a federal statute in the official printed United States Code published by the GPO to cite it to Bluebook standards. If I won the lottery, I would just buy every new volume each time one came out. As of this writing, there appear to be six volumes so far, each costing from between $138 and $156. If I spent that kind of money on infrequently used law books (I do much more Texas state work than I do federal work.), the financial controller of my law firm (AKA my wife) would have my ass.

As a practical matter, for formal citation of federal statutes, I am almost certainly going to need to make at least one trip to a Houston law library.

Do not confuse the U.S.C. with the United States Code Annotated by West-- probably the print edition easiest to access-- or the United States Code Service by LexisNexis. The annotations of these versions make them much more helpful for actual research. The rap on these two is generally that West's has a few more notes. The very,very nice folks at LexisNexis say that their version is more carefully edited-- that is, the extra annotations in West's aren't really interpretive-- they include a lot references to U.S.C. sections that are merely formal and add nothing, and LexisNexis costs a great deal less. Of course, access to U.S.C.A. is on the Westlaw computer service and U.S.C.S. can be gotten to on LexisNexis's website.

There are many fine, no-charge Internet sources of federal statutes:

• The U.S. House of Representatives,
• The United States Government Printing Office, and
• Cornell University's Legal Information Institute (a worthy cause to contribute to), and
• FindLaw by West.

U.S.C.A., U.S.C.S. and the no-charge cites above don't have the formal volume numbers and year numbers that the Bluebook requires, but they are fine for everyday use.

The GPO's annual U.S.C. CD-ROM is only $15, but presently the latest one is the one in which the statutes in force as of January 5, 2009 are collected.

People will look back at these times when formal legal citation required a book full of paper pages to be checked as a dark ages, and it might be that a physical edition may always have to be authoritative or authoritatively checked, but there's no reason it could not be some sort of read-only data file, one for which access could be gotten for no charge, notwithstanding at least one trend going the other way. It's no surprise that the Government Printing Office wants to change its name to the Government Publishing Office, since putting ink on paper will be less and less of what it does.

It's Blue and It Makes Law Students and Lawyers Blue, Too

Another complaint from a working lawyer about the length and expense of the Harvard legal Bluebook. It aptly compares other academic style guides to the legal standard. The 19th edition has 511 pages, not counting 13 pages of frontal matter, a cover sheet and the printed, two-sided covers. The Unbearable Heaviness of Being the Bluebook.

Help for Those Studying the Bluebook

North Carolina Central University School of Law has materials to help you study how to use the Harvard Bluebook when writing your briefs, etc.

Bluebook Style: Citing to the Internet

Lawyers USA Online's article on Bluebook citation to the Internet is here.

Westlaw Fixes-- Better Citations and the Promise of Rapture

I'm on the email lists and mailing lists for Westlaw's updates.

The pamphlet I got in the mail today offers the promise of their citations being in Harvard Blue Book form or Texas Green Book form when one copies them out of their database, which has long seemed to me to be the most pointless inconvenience of Westlaw.

I hear that West made this upgrade because of competition from Lexis-- a fine organization-- love their LexisOne emails and service. Still, though, however frustrating West is, I don't know how to do a Texas statutory search straight from one's computer to printout that meets Green Book standards using Lexis alone (To meet Bluebook form for a federal statute, you should really use the Government Printing Office's volumes of the United States Code no matter what computer search base you are using.).

That the main image for the advertising campaign seems to be a beautiful young brunette woman, eyes closed or downcast, hair rapturously windblown gives me mixed feelings. My hope that some day good computer legal research will run as fast as Google is not unrealistic. But even for me, who loves a Westlaw searching almost as much as chocolate, I do not expect to be swept away with joy-- the way the advertising girl seems to be-- whenever I log on to the ThomsonReuters website. Work is work.

On Renting, as Opposed to Buying, the Bluebook

The Bluebook is still in its 18th edition. The Bluebook people will sell you a copy for about $25. They'll also let you subscribe for $25 per year and for $15 per year for the next two years. The subscription means that you'd have your up-to-date Bluebook with you anytime you could get online. The subscription is a greater outlay of money than using the book. I also have the experience that flipping through books is practically always faster than waiting for pages to download. The subscription will be the way to go for true road warriors-- people who actually draft substantive legal documents as they make their business trips.