Everything you know is wrong.
At least that’s what a forthcoming article by Harvard Law School graduate and current Yale Law librarian Fred Shapiro ‘80 and co-author Julie Graves Krishnaswami claims about the Bluebook.
The received origins of the Bluebook, bane of lawyers and lawyers-to-be everywhere, goes a little something like this:
Once upon a time, there was a Harvard Law Review citation pamphlet, compiled by no less a figure than Griswold Hall’s namesake and Dean of Harvard Law School, Erwin Griswold.
Through sheer force of will, Griswold and the Harvard Law Review grew his little pamphlet into the 582-page monstrosity we have today. This story is itself printed in publications no less illustrious than the Harvard Law Review and the Wikipedia article for the Bluebook.
However, if you were to think that the Harvard Law Review is not only responsible for the annual disappointment of 1Ls who failed to write on, but also responsible for the wretched citation manual that has an italicization error in its own explanation on how to italicize introductory signals in its most recent 20thedition, well, you’d be wrong, or at least, partly wrong.
According to Shapiro and Krishnaswami, it’s clear from the archives that the true origins of the Bluebook lies in a single-page pamphlet by Yale Law Journal editor and Iron Cross recipient Karl Llewellyn, that Griswold wasn’t much more than a copy-maker, and that the Harvard Law Review improperly hoarded Bluebook royalties all to itself for decades. The Record talked to Shapiro to find out more about his revisionist take on the Bluebook’s history.
Record: How did you get into Bluebook history research?
Shapiro: Back in the 1990s, I noticed there were two tiny little booklets in Yale’s rare book collection that seemed clearly to be precursors of the Bluebook. They looked like the Bluebook, the same examples were used for citations, and a lot of the text was the same. I didn’t do anything about it until a few years ago, when I decided that this was worth researching further.
R: You mention that the Bluebook is a cause of conservative thinking in your paper. Can you talk more about that?
S: Because law review editors want a source for every assertion, authors may be intimidated from original thought. If you say the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, they’ll ask for a footnote. Generally in scholarship, original research is considered a good thing, but law reviews want a source for everything.
R: How does the Bluebook affect the law and the legal system?
S: The Bluebook has reinforced the doctrine of precedent, and the doctrine of precedent is certainly a conservative force in the legal system. It constrains judges from doing something original.
R: Why do you think the Bluebook had grown in length as it has from a single-page pamphlet to what it is now?
S: The benign explanation is that there are more kinds of sources. The more malignant explanation is that it’s just grown the way a cancer cell grows, and that the legal profession as a whole may benefit from obscurity. I work as a law librarian and it can take me a half hour to find the right rule.
R: What was the Harvard Law Review’s initial involvement with the Bluebook?
S: Yale actually created the movement for uniform citation and the Harvard Law Review was opposed to the movement at the beginning. They had to be convinced by Yale and Columbia.
R: What’s the story with the Bluebook royalties?
S: So for the first 50 years of the Bluebook, Harvard got all the money. Then in the 1970s, a student at Yale on her summer associate job was talking to other summer associates who were Harvard Law Review editors and who were bragging about all their money from the Bluebook. When she got back to Yale, she ended up leading a movement. It took several years before the other three schools who share copyright got a share of the revenues. Harvard still gets more money, presumably because they do more work.
R: Do you think the Bluebook should shrink in length?
S: As a law librarian, I like the details, but the original, created by Karl Llewellyn, was only one page of rules. Somewhere there has to be a compromise between simplicity and completeness, and I think that’s what’s lacking currently.
R: Thank you so much.
S: Thanks for your interest. Take care.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. “The Secret History of the Bluebook” is forthcoming in the Minnesota Law Review and is available now on SSRN at www.ssrn.com/abstract=2697068.