News reports are piling in about an intense hacking attack on the website and servers of the publishers of the famed legal Bluebook. It was not immediately clear what the hackers were after, though there was some suspicion that the hack was state-sponsored. It was not till the next morning that an inkling of the magnitude of what was stolen first arose. “We just heard a thump on the floor upstairs,” said Meghan Gould, Reviewing Editor for Italicization of Certain Signals, “and we were shocked to find Benjamin Zhu, Supervising Editor for Proper Underlining and Periodization, had fainted.” After resuscitating him by waving the Bluebook to generate air and good feelings, he informed the management team that the capacity to remove underlining from underneath commas had been removed from the Bluebook’s special word processing software. (The software is manufactured by Anyl Computing Systems in conjunction with the Society for the Productive use of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.) Amidst choking sobs—broken into even periods—he proceeded to tell them that the small caps feature had also been eliminated. “I took that news very hard,” said Jordan Green, Director of Marked Capitalization, “the small caps feature was a particularly useful way of distinguishing between 1Ls, you know, like separating the wheat from the chaff.” This interruption has slowed down Jordan’s completion of his dissertation on the Marquis de Sade.
A comprehensive investigation has revealed that multiple data sets were in fact stolen. Amongst these were the capacity for unitalicizing commas, as well as certain critical modifications to the abbreviations tables. While most of these are top secret, we were able to ascertain that the abbreviations for “Scalia,” “equality,” “Tribe,” and “sell-out,” were some of the more serious casualties. “We are very concerned about the effects on the environment caused by the extra paper needed because of these lost abbreviations,” said Richard Freedman of the Society for Environmental Justice. Harvard “Heat Week” protesters have removed the periods in all their statements in solidarity, while Divest Harvard is now considering a lawsuit against No Hacks Period, the cybersecurity firm employed by the Bluebook.
In an ostensibly unrelated comment, Defense Secretary Cass Rubenstein said in an interview that China has been aggressively trying to obtain the secret to American rule of law. “State control of behavior is only one arm of China’s nudging,” he said. “China is very interested in a very formal legal system which does not reflect any substantive reality,” said Harvard Law Professor of Law with Chinese Characteristics, Mark Alford, “so the Bluebook would be an obvious target for them.” Academics were split about the potential effects of the hack on judicial decisions, in particular the inability to remove italicization of commas. Scalia’s Right of the American Constitution Society expressed concern that the slant of italicized commas may cause opinions to lean more to the right, while Just Essen of the Federalist Society felt it would be counteracted by liberal lunch habits. On the academic front, Harvard Professor of Very Literal Textualism, Adrian Manning, was enlisting English majors to assist in research on the effects of the absence of small caps on textualist philosophy.
Other commentators took a very positive view of the hack. Sirius Equiteos of Students against Cultural Injustice and National Pride, lauded the attack as an appropriate redistribution of the rules governing signals and short-form citations long monopolized by the elite writocracy of the Harvard Law Review. “This really will assist 25% of the world’s population long marginalized from this very important body of knowledge,” she said. Knowa Lessig, of the Berkman Policy Group on Open Data and No More Private Information, took a slightly different perspective. “What right do you have to lock your property behind passwords and firewalls?” he said. Some in the judiciary were even ebullient over this turn of events. “This is a real victory for rule of law,” said Richard Posner, “I can finally focus exclusively on economics and not waste my time insisting the Bluebook staff ‘Answer me now.’”
Please note: In case you did not notice, all the commas in this essay are italicized in solidarity.