BLUEBOOK CITATION IN SCHOLARLY LEGAL WRITING

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The writing assignments you receive in 1L Legal Research and Writing or Legal Practice are primarily

practice-based documents such as memoranda and briefs, so your experience using the Bluebook as a

first year student has likely been limited to the practitioner style of legal writing. When writing scholarly

papers and for your law journal, however, you will need to use the Bluebook’s typeface conventions for

law review articles. Although answers to all your citation questions can be found in the Bluebook itself,

there are some key, but subtle differences between practitioner writing and scholarly writing you should

Most law reviews use the same typeface style, which includes Ordinary Times New Roman, Italics, and

SMALL CAPITALS. In court documents, use Ordinary Roman, Italics, and Underlining.

Scholarly Writing

In scholarly writing footnotes, use Ordinary Roman type for case names in full citations, including in

citation sentences contained in footnotes. This typeface is also used in the main text of a document.

Use Italics for the short form of case citations. Use Italics for article titles, introductory signals,

procedural phrases in case names, and explanatory signals in citations. Italicize punctuation only when it

falls within italicized material in a citation. In the main text, italicize case names; procedural phrases;

and titles of publications (including statutory compilations), speeches, or articles. You also can use

italics for emphasis.

Use SMALL CAPITALS for the author and title of a book and the name of a periodical (such as a law

review) in a scholarly writing citation.

Practice-based Documents

In practice-based and court documents, use Ordinary Roman type for the reporter volume number, the

in publication citations; and for introductory signals when they appear as part of a textual sentence.

Use Underlining or Italics in practice-based and court documents for case names in citations, including

introducing prior or subsequent history and related authority in a citation; for cross-references and short

forms of citations; for the title of a publication in a citation;and for names of publications in a textual