Comas, Maria

Levine, Jan M.

English

Duquesne University: Digital Commons

Duquesne University Duquesne Scholarship Collection Law Faculty Publications School of Law 5-2021 Addressing Employers' Citation Systems Confusion Maria Comas Jan M. Levine Follow this and additional works at: https://dsc.duq.edu/law-faculty-scholarship  Part of the Legal Writing and Research Commons MAY  2021  NALP BULLETIN 34ADDRESSING EMPLOYERS’ CITATION SYSTEMS CONFUSIONContinued on page 35By Maria Comas and Jan LevineLegal citation practices have been devel-oped so that lawyers and judges can find cited authorities in a law library or a database, and as a shorthand method of demonstrating the importance and relevance of cited authorities. In most law school first-year legal research and writing courses, the faculty teach legal citation for practitioners because the students are learning legal citation in the context of drafting legal mem-oranda and appellate briefs, not law journal articles. There are two citation books in common use in U.S. law schools. The traditional source is the Bluebook (A Uniform System of Citation), which was prepared by the students at the Harvard Law Review primarily for use with the preparation of law review articles using footnotes, and it has a sepa-rate smaller section for practitioner document formatting. Since 2000, however, the ALWD Guide to Legal Citation, which has been written by legal writing professors under the auspices of the Association of Legal Writing Directors and Wolters Kluwer Law & Business, has been adopted by many legal research and writing programs at U.S. law schools. The ALWD Guide focuses on the types of docu-ments practitioners prepare, and it integrates “Academic Formatting” (used for law journal articles) within the appropriate citation rules.(Note: The author of the ALWD Guide has prepared charts of “Rule Correlations” going from the Sixth Edition of the ALWD Guide to the Bluebook and vice-versa, for use at work and to help students who are completing a law review tryout or working on a law review article. These charts and other materials are available online at the ALWD website at www.alwd.org/publications/citation-manual.) Many legal writing professors believe the ALWD Guide is the best citation guide for teaching students, and that the student-draft-ed Bluebook is much more difficult to use and contains far fewer explanations and examples than the ALWD Guide. Career Services Office staff should be aware that there are abso-lutely no resulting citation format differences based upon whether a writer uses the current edition of the ALWD Guide or the current edi-tion of the Bluebook, although the rule num-bers from each source leading to those results will differ. The quality of citations produced by a summer law clerk are based upon how well the student learned citation in the first-year of law school, not upon which tool the professor used to teach that student.MAY  2021  NALP BULLETIN 35 Continued from page 34Maria Comas (comas@duq.edu) is Director, Career Services and Jan Levine (levinej@duq.edu) is Professor and Director, Legal Research & Writing Program at the Duquesne University School of Law. This article was submitted on behalf of the Small & Solo CSO Section.Maria Comas Jan LevineWhen students are at work in a summer clerkship, they may be asked to “Bluebook” a document. We should remember, and remind employers, that “Bluebooking” is a generic term, just like saying “Xerox this” for making a photocopy or referring to a small bandage as a “Band-Aid” regardless of the manufactur-er’s name for the product. All it means is that students have been asked to review the citations within the document for proper format and for accuracy and ve-racity. Most lawyers and judges rely on their fading memories of the now-ancient citation book that they used when they were fi rst-year students or members of a law journal, typi-cally going back many decades (and several now-obsolete editions). Legal writing faculty teaching from the ALWD Guide do explain this to their students, but sometimes students are not in the best position to explain that citations in a document will look the same regardless of the book from which the  “Bluebooking” is a generic term, just like saying “Xerox this” for making a photocopy or referring to a small bandage as a “Band-Aid” regardless of the manufacturer’s name for the product.students were taught. Faculty using the ALWD Guide believe that their students are better able to produce quality citations than stu-dents taught using the Bluebook because of the superior nature of the Guide as a tool for teaching, and they would not have adopted the Guide if students were disadvantaged in the quality of citations they can produce.We all should remember, too, that many state courts have their own unique and idiosyncrat-ic citation rules, that local practice can differ from offi cial court rules, and each lawyer and law offi ce is likely to have idiosyncratic expectations for citations. (The sources for offi cial state law citation rules are all com-piled in Appendix 2 of the Sixth Edition of the ALWD Guide. The Bluebook does not offer such assistance.) Because of this complicated environment in which they will be working, law students need to understand formal legal citation rules and principles in general, but also must consult local rules and practices for the specifi c requirements for proper legal citation. Some law schools teach local rules and practice in their fi rst-year legal writing programs, but many do not.

Addressing Employers\u27 Citation Systems Confusion

https://dsc.duq.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1061&amp;context=law-faculty-scholarship

Addressing Employers\u27 Citation Systems Confusion

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