In Support of the Free The Indigo Book and The Bluebook Uncovered
Last month, I shared some free resources for the beginning of fall. This month, I’m focusing on free Bluebook help. When Columbia, Harvard, et. al published the twenty-second edition of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation last spring, many of my fellow bloggers provided great summaries of the key changes and helpful notes on what these editors suggest for citations now.
While I should have carefully read all of that sage advice, instead, I averted my eyes and tried to pretend there was not yet another new Bluebook. Then, school started, and I was blessed with a generous colleague who provided updated citation exercises for our whole team. (Note, LAR&W faculty are the best!) I did, indeed, have to dig into my new Bluebook, provided to me after my school paid an eye-popping cost of $57, but at least I had comfort from someone else’s hard work on the changes.
Ultimately, however, The Bluebook editors just reminded me of how much I dislike paying for a new citation manual every five years. To be clear, I believe the discussion about many of the 2025 changes—like spacing after periods–is important. See generally James Hamblin, The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period, The Atlantic (May 11, 2018) https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/05/two-spaces-after-a-period/559304/. I also agree that we needed an update on citing and noting GAI and online materials. I just do not agree that we must blindly follow what some law review editors say on the two-spaces matter or that we should not object to minor cite form changes that seem to exist only in the name of change every few years.
My concerns about the cost and vagaries of the Bluebook are especially strong in California, where I practice and teach, as our state courts provide the California Style Manual, colloquially called the Yellow Book, which the courts last updated many years ago and offer as a free PDF on some court websites. The Yellow Book might have some oddities—like supra and infra in case cites, but at least it is free and stable.
For these reasons, I am putting in another plug for the free and open-source The Indigo Book, last updated in 2023 as The Indigo Book 2.0 by Professor Jennifer Romig. See Christopher Sprigman and Jennifer Romig et al., The Indigo Book: A Manual of Legal Citation, Public Resource (2d ed. 2023), https://law.resource.org/pub/us/code/blue/indigobook-2.0-beta.html. I appreciate the Indigo Book’s straightforward and even lighthearted focus on what really matters for citation, all in a free format. Because The Indigo Book is a labor of love, and earns no profits, the book is slower to update after a new Bluebook than some resources. Nonetheless, it remains a great free option for us all.
To supplement your Indigo Book, especially as we await what I hope will be a 3.0 version, I suggest another free, open-source PDF, The Bluebook Uncovered: A Practical Guide to Mastering Legal Citation, by Prof. Dionne E. Anthon. Prof. Anton has already updated this resource to include the twenty-second edition of The Bluebook and posted the new edition here on August 6: https://dionneanthon.com/bbu/bbu22.html. She thanks “West Academic for agreeing to release the copyright of this book back to” her so she “could make it available for free,” and she allows non-commercial use of the book. See id. The Bluebook Uncovered has rich content from an introduction on why cites matter to detailed tables and exercises. I highly recommend the book as a companion to any citation manual, and it will definitely help anyone struggling to use the new The Bluebook.
As I tell my students: do your best to follow The Bluebook, but overall just cite often, give case years and court names not provided by the reporter in full cites, provide a pincite page to the material you’re using, and keep your format consistent, so your readers have all the info they need to understand. The Indigo Book and The Bluebook Uncovered will help you polish this citation approach with free, open-source material.
Happy citing, everyone!