The Indigo BookNo, this is not exactly the Bluebook. It is a FREE guide that contains the EXACT same systems (Uniform System) that is described most famously in the Bb. This is the definitive manual for putting together legal citations in the standard format.
It is important to understand, when we are talking about The Bluebook, A Uniform System of Citation, that we are talking about two different things. There is a product, a spiral-bound booklet that sells for $38.50, which is accompanied by a rudimentary web site available to purchasers of the product.
Underlying that product, however, is something much more basic and fundamental, a uniform system of citation. Unpaid volunteers from a dozen law schools, under the stewardship of four nonprofit student-run law reviews, have labored mightily to reach a consensus standard for the citation of legal materials. This open consensus standard was developed, with no compensation to the authors, for the greater benefit of the legal system of the United States. By clearly and precisely referring to primary legal materials, we are able to communicate our legal reasoning to others, including pleading a case in the courts, advocating changes in legal policy in our legislatures or law reviews, or simply communicating the law to our fellow citizens so that we may be better informed... (more)We do not begrudge the Harvard Law Review Association one penny of the revenue from the sale of their spiral-bound book dressed in blue. However, we must not confuse the book with the system. There can be no proprietary claim over knowledge and facts, and there is no intellectual property right in the system and method of our legal machinery. The infrastructure of our legal system is a public utility, and belongs to all of us.
As Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig has famously stated, “code is law.” The system of citation is code, an algorithm consisting of rules and a set of enumerations of text strings and their proper abbreviations. This is code about law.
In thinking of The Bluebook, I have been reminded of Big Blue, the IBM corporation. IBM made a fortune selling Genuine IBM personal computers, but this did not prevent others from making clones that were able to exercise the instructions in the underlying chipset. When technology changed the nature of the computer industry, IBM did not spend its days trying to defend an outdated mode of operation and instead moved up the food chain. The company has grown and prospered because of the computing revolution and the Internet instead of trying to preserve an outdated position of economic power that could not last.
Likewise, I wish the Harvard Law Review Association and their three companion law reviews the best in continuing to sell their Genuine Blue spiral-bound book and any associated on-line services. However, that cannot mean prohibiting an open source developer from using common abbreviations, and it certainly does not imply any ownership or control over how, in our democracy, we communicate the law with our fellow citizens. I hope you will enjoy The Indigo Book: A Manual of Legal Citation and that you will join me in extending my congratulations to Professor Sprigman and his students on the excellent job they have performed in re-coding those rules.
Carl Malamud
Public.Resource.Org
