I Don't Bluebook

I Don't.

When you walk into law school one of the first things you will need to obtain is that shiny, spiral bound, 550 page sadomasochism how-to manual compiled by people who I'm sure have a great time telling every person they've ever met about how they were on law review. Within its pages, a uniform system of citation, made by lawyers, for lawyers, because what other group of people could produce such a monstrosity. The many charts, tables, and page after page of citation example is a bedtime favorite of everyone who chose the wire mother.

I, like many a lawyer before me have spent many precious tenths of an hour frustratingly poring over page after page trying to figure out how to cite a footnote within an attachment to an opposition brief. I have given precious moments upon this earth to determining whether a comma needs to go after a period, or whether there should be space between the parentheses in two adjacent parentheticals. But to this day, I can't tell you if pro se should be italicized. (probably, maybe).

I will clean floorboards, do dishes, go back to my (real) old job as a tractor mechanic, or even brave logging into PACER. but please don't make me bluebook.

All of this to say, that here, where there are no law firm partners who were the head of law review (and no junior associates desperate for work I can ask to do it for me) I will cite how I damn well please.

So I may not Bluebook, but I always cite check. Particularly in today's day and age when any piece of work product I am handed by another attorney may contain content generated by an LLM chatbot. I despise these things we are all forced to colloquially refer to as "AI." They've infected my search engines, my word processors, the app for my thermostat, and of course all manner of legal software From Westlaw and Lexis to document review platforms and even our email.

But many lawyers have to learn the hard lesson that software that produces outputs based on probabilities will always produce hallucinations. Among my many obsessions are the American far right, bicycle infrastructure, and AI hallucinations being filed with courts around the country. I plan to write a lot here about the intersection of technology and law, particularly the ways "AI" is impacting the practice of law. Or whatever else I want to write about, there's nobody here to stop me.