BLUEBOOK CITATION IN SCHOLARLY LEGAL WRITING
© 2016 The Writing Center at GULC. All Rights Reserved.
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
be careful not to overlook.
Your first encounter with law review-style citations will probably be the journal Write-On competition
at the end of your first year. This guide may help you in the transition from providing Bluebook citations
in court documents to doing the same for law review articles, with a focus on the sources that you are
likely to encounter in the Write-On competition.
1. Typeface (Rule 2)
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.
Revised by Alie Kolbe and Karl Bock. Originally drafted by Kristen Murray and Karin Scherner-Kim,
with revisions by Eric Nitz.