Customer Reviews

ALWD Citation Manual: A Professional System of Citation, 3rd Edition

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© 2000 Steven D. Jamar - nonexclusive license to publish granted to Amazon.com

First, a disclosure - I was a co-chair of the ALWD Citation Manual Oversight committee and so am not disinterested in the book.

In a hands-on competition between the ALWD Citation Manual and the Bluebook, the ALWD Citation Manual wins hands down. When you try to use each book (the "hands-on" test), the ALWD Citation Manual is simply incomparably superior to the BB.

About three years ago, the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD, variously pronounced "Al Wid" or "All Wood" (I personally prefer the latter)), an organization of more than 200 members representing approximately 150 law schools, undertook the ambitious project of developing and publishing a new legal citation manual. The years of work came to fruition when the ALWD Citation Manual was published. This book, prepared by professionals for professionals, will, I believe, eventually displace The Bluebook.

ALWD Citation Manual and the Bluebook

One of the guiding ideas for the new manual was that it would be, for the most part, a restatement of the rules of citation based on the citation form actually used by experts. As a result of this conservative approach, citation done in the ALWD format will be familiar to practitioners and scholars alike. There are a number of small changes, but the citations will be instantly understood by any lawyer who learned any one (or more) of the 16 different versions of citation promulgated by the 16 different editions of The Bluebook.

Because the learning (and unlearning) to be done is minimal, it will be easy to adapt to either system and to move between them. Those who know The Bluebook will be able to adapt to the ALWD Citation Manual easily; those who learn the ALWD Citation Manual will be able to conform ALWD-compliant work to Bluebook requirements with relatively little additional specialized learning, especially for practitioner documents.

A Teaching Tool

The ALWD Citation Manual is not merely a reference book; it is also a teaching book. The attention paid to making the book much easier to teach from and learn from will make it particularly attractive to those who teach legal citation. Key features furthering this aim are the explicit articulation of a general rule of citation, numerous user-friendly examples of citations of each type of work, and design features that facilitate ease of reading and parsing rules. The book features two color printing; "Sidebars" to explain matters related to citation that are not rules per se; and "Fast Formats," a collection of pages illustrating proper citation form for most types of works. This latter feature will be very useful for someone who knows the citation forms already but needs to double-check some detail. The "fast formats" will also provide students and teachers with a rich source of examples of the application of the rules.

ALWD is maintaining a Web site which will include a ALWD Citation Manual support page to provide answers to frequently asked questions and to update the Manual as needed.

Goals and Features of ALWD Citation Manual

ALWD had a number of aims in creating this citation manual: to simplify some of the rules, to reduce inconsistencies, to make the rules responsive to the needs of lawyers as well as scholars, and, over the long term, to provide stability and uniformity of citation rules.

Among the simplifications, two stand out most prominently. First, how you cite a source does not depend on where you cite it. Gone are the arcane differences that depended upon whether the case was cited in a brief to the court, in a footnote to the text in an academic journal, or in the text proper of a law review article. The citation form in each setting is now the same.

The second major simplification is the elimination of the use of small caps in citations. There are now only two type styles: italics and regular type. If the portion of the cite is not in italics (such as signals and titles), then it is to be in regular type. The ALWD Citation Manual contains a simple list of what to put in italics; everything not on the list is to be in regular type.

Providing stability and uniformity of citation over the long term is important so that the scholars of tomorrow can understand the citations of today. Stability of citation form will also mean that what law students learn today will not be obsolete five years out of school. These goals, seemingly inherent in the very underpinnings of a system of citation, do not appear to have been sufficiently appreciated by the publishers of The Bluebook. Even as these goals were paid lipservice-the subtitle of The Bluebook is "A Uniform System of Citation" after all-the achievement of both stability and uniformity has been frustrated by frequent changes in citation form wrought by the student publishers of The Bluebook over the years.

This is a laudable effort and should prove very helpful to lawyers now and in the future.

There are two citation manuals for lawyers: Bluebook, which has been around for several years and is compiled by the Harvard Law Review, and ALWD, which was recently developed by the Association of Legal Writing Directors.

As a current law student, I had the benefit of approaching ALWD without ever having used Bluebook. I have since used both ALWD and Bluebook, and I find ALWD to be much more user-friendly. ALWD and Bluebook are identical in many respects, but finding citation rules in ALWD is more intuitive. For a law student who has to refer often to citation rules, ease of use is a definite benefit.

Having said that, there have been occasions where ALWD has not contained the information that I have needed, so I have had to refer to Bluebook. While Bluebook seems to be more comprehensive, ALWD is easier to use for all but the most esoteric citation rules. Thus, ALWD is not a replacement for Blue Book so much as it is a companion to it.

If you are in law school hopefully you'll have the option to use this book instead of using the Bluebook, it is much easier to understand and it's laid out in a way that is easy to follow. Also the index is very good, which is important in this kind of reference book.

Someone above, shamelessly promoting the CiteIt! program needs to get a clue--you will not (and I mean not have a hope of) make it through your legal citation class using the CiteIt! program alone. If you think you can just plop a big mess into the program and a pristine citiation will drop out the bottom, guess again.

The software is not that good. I'd rate CiteIt about a four on a 10 point scale. It's nice, and it does have some good features, but if you've got to do real-world law school legal citation work to do don't think you can get by with a program alone. At least not anything I've see so far.

Sometimes things change for the better, but not the Bluebook. What good fortune then that we are offered an alternative-especially one as organized and straightforward as the ALWD Citation Manual.

Disclosure: I am on a committee that promotes the ALWD Citation Manual. But I volunteered for the committee because the ALWD Manual is so good. Students who learn citation from the ALWD Manual will be fine because most of the concerns expressed by critics of the ALWD Manual are based on myths.

Myth 1: Practicing lawyers know the Bluebook. Sorry, but most lawyers don't even own the current Bluebook. Most own the one they got in law school, whether that's the 13th, 14th, 15th, or 16th edition. We're now on the 17th edition. And even then, most lawyers cite according to what they vaguely recall from law school, or they get someone else to do the citations.

Myth 2: Judges require bluebook citation form. Wrong. Most courts DO NOT require Bluebook form. Instead, they require uniform and consistent citations. And most judges would not know Bluebook citations from ALWD Manual citations. The differences are so few and so minor.

Myth 3: Students who learn ALWD Manual form will be in trouble when they go to work on a journal and must use the Bluebook. I doubt it. They will know citation form better because they learned it from a readable, logical manual. What will happen is that they will become disgusted with the Bluebook once they see how poorly written it is.

As a paralegal, I assist my supervising attorneys in writing briefs for administrative hearings and federal court. We had a brief due in which we were citing federal law, California Education Code, and a plethora of State-generated publications and web content that were created in response to State and Federal mandates. I had no idea how to format the legal cites for some of our more unusual sources of data. I ordered the ALWD Citation Manual and had it in my hands within days. It was a little confusing to look up which types of cites applied to my materials, though. Some things were pretty easy to figure out, but other things were more cryptic. In the end, we figured it out and it helped us get our brief out on time and properly formatted.

The Alwd Citation Manual is more efficient to use than the Bluebook, and I have been happy using it throughout law-school.

With regards to the CiteIt software, I must warn potential buyers that a better name for it would have been CrapIt...
It is way overpriced, and basically useless.
The most fun I had with CiteIt was uninstalling it!

My class does not start until end of January. So happy I was able to purchase book way ahead of time. A new book and great price! Thanks.

This book is extremely useful if you plan on working in a law office, court, or anywhere that you may have to review or prepare court documents. It is very clearly written, therefore you will find yourself referring to it regularly, so best to keep it handy.

This product was sent to me in better condition than I had expected, which is very good because I intend to keep it to reference, for a very long time.