The Bluebook is the most well-known resource for the citation of authorities in legal documents. It has been available since 1926 and is now published by the editors of The Columbia Law Review, The Harvard Law Review, The University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and The Yale Law Journal. Since the sixth edition in 1939, it has had a blue cover. Fred R. Shapiro & Julie Graves Krishnaswami, The Secret History of the Bluebook, 100 Minn. L. Rev. 1563, 1582 n.67 (2016). As a result, even though for many years the official title was A Uniform System of Citation, people ignored the title and just called it the Bluebook. Starting with the 15th edition in 1991, the official title changed to The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation. Since the 1970s, new editions have come out about every five years. In part, this is because new resources to cite become available making new rules necessary, and over the years the size of this book has increased from 28 pages to over 500 pages. I suspect that another reason for the new editions over the years is so that the version I purchased in law school appears to be increasingly outdated, prompting me to spend money on new versions.
Electronic Access
For many years now, I've found it more useful to use an electronic version of The Bluebook so that I can always access it on my iPhone or iPad without having to hunt for a paper copy. Back in 2012, I reviewed an app called Rulebook that allowed you to purchase the 19th edition of The Bluebook. You can now get the 20th edition of The Bluebook in the Rulebook app. (Rulebook is now owned by Casemaker. Casemaker showed me a beta version of a new version of Rulebook in early 2019, and I was told recently that the update will finally be available soon.)
The 21st edition of The Bluebook was just released, and you can now purchase the traditional wire-bound paper copy for $45. I don't know if an electronic version of the latest edition will eventually be available in an app like Rulebook, but the 21st edition is now available online on a mobile-friendly website. You can try it for free for three days, and after that, you need to pay an annual subscription of $39. That's right, they've come up with a way for me to have to pay essentially the full cost of the book every single year. Lovely. But you can save a little money by purchasing two years for $59 or three years for $79. There will also be a pricing plan for law firms, but it has not been announced yet.
I joke about the price, but the reality is that throughout the 26 years that I have been practicing law, I've frequently found The Bluebook to be a useful resource. I was interested to see how the new online version of the 21st edition works on my iPad, so I signed up for the three-day free trial. And I have to admit that I'm impressed.
You access The Bluebook Online by going to a website and signing in. Given that The Bluebook is something that I need when I am drafting appellate or trial court briefs, I suspect that I will always use The Bluebook when I have access to the Internet, so online access should always work for me. I suspect it will work for others too.
Dashboard
There are five main tabs along the left side of the iPad screen. The first tab is the Dashboard. It serves as a cover and gives you access to rules that you have recently viewed and rules that you have pinned.
Quick Style Guide
The next tab is the Quick Style Guide. It gives you the basic information that you need for the most common types of citations.
I believe that anyone can access the Quick Style Guide, even without a subscription, by using this page.
Bluepages
The next tab is called Bluepages, and these are the pages that are tinted blue in the paper book. They provide rules for practitioners to use when citing authority in non-academic legal documents. These are the pages that I find the most useful because I always use The Bluebook when drafting a brief. Now that I think about it, it has been a long time since I wrote citations for an academic publication — I see that the law review article that I wrote in law school hasn't been cited since Clark v. State, 781 A.2d 913 (Md. Ct. Spec. App. 2001), so maybe it's time for me to write another one.
Speaking of the Bluepages, I see that there is a somewhat significant change in the new 21st edition that could be interesting to attorneys who practice in federal court — or anyone who practices in a court that uses a word count instead of a page count. The new version of Rule B6 now gives practitioners the option of closing up abbreviations in reporter names to reduce the word count. Here is how the relevant part of B6 now reads:
Close up adjacent single capitals (U.S.), but do not close up single capitals with longer abbreviations (S. Ct.). Every abbreviation should be followed by a period (Univ.), except those in which the last letter is set off by an apostrophe (Soc'y).
Because many court systems impose word limits on briefs and other documents submitted to the court, abbreviations in reporter names may optionally be closed to conserve space, even if they would normally be separated under this rule. For example, “S. Ct.” would become “S.Ct.” and “F. Supp. 2d” would become “F.Supp.2d.”
If you find yourself in a tight situation with the word count for a brief, I suppose this is an option.
Whitepages
The next tab is called Whitepages. This is the main part of The Bluebook. While designed for academic documents, it is often useful for lawyers writing briefs.
Pins
The final tab of The Bluebook is reserved for sections that you have pinned. For example, at the end of the Whitepages there are sixteen sections of tables with all sorts of useful information. In fact, one of the tables — T2 for Foreign Jurisdictions — is no longer even a part of the paper version of The Bluebook; you have to access it online. The table that I often find useful when citing cases is T6, which provides appropriate abbreviations for words that commonly appear in case names. So I pinned it.
Search
I find the online version of The Bluebook easier to access than the paper book. Just save it as a bookmark and it is always there when you need it. An online resources is also easier to work with than a paper book because there is a big search bar at the top of every page. Just type any word and you will instantly see a list of all of the sections in which the word (or even something similar to the word) appears.
The organization of the Bluebook makes it fairly easy to find items just by browsing. But for those more difficult circumstances, the search bar lets you easily find a needle in the haystack.
iPhone
The Bluebook Online works very well on an iPad. You can also access it on an iPhone, although I don't like it quite as much. With the much more limited screen real estate, you need tap through more menus to move around, and you cannot see as much text on the screen. But it certainly works.
I have one pet peeve about the iPhone version. A big blue tab called "Feedback" is always present on the right side of the screen. I found myself tapping it by accident very frequently, which was frustrating. I eventually used the Feedback button to send some feedback — namely, that they get rid of the darn Feedback tab. I thought that after sending some feedback the tab would go away, but no such luck. Hopefully, they will listen to my complaint and remove this.
Conclusion
I suspect that you already know whether The Bluebook is useful to your own law practice. If it is, The Bluebook Online is a very handy way to access the latest edition. It works really well on the iPad, it can be used on an iPhone, and of course, you can also access it on your computer from any web browser. I think that the price is a little high considering that you can pay $45 just once for the paper version and it will remain current for the next five years. Nevertheless, I'm sure that I will be paying $79 for the three-year subscription.