U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas went rogue on the Bluebook when he embraced an appellate lawyer’s suggestion for dealing with “citation baggage” that comes with some quoted material.
Jack Metzler, an appellate lawyer with the Federal Trade Commission, outlined the problem in an article at SSRN in March 2017. When court decisions and briefs quote from an earlier source, and the earlier source sometimes quotes an even earlier source, the Bluebook rules make for a lot of “citation baggage” that distracts from the point.
“Following the Bluebook in those situations can result in a confusing mess of nested quotation marks, brackets and parenthetical information that distracts from the writer’s point in using the quotation—to convey what the court being quoted actually said,” Metzler explained in an email to the ABA Journal. “I proposed that writers could use a single parenthetical—(cleaned up)—to signal that extraneous material was removed from the quotation without changing any of the underlying text.”
Thomas adopted Metzler’s solution in his Feb. 25 decision in Brownback v. King, adding the words “cleaned up” in parentheses after a sentence quoting from an earlier decision, Law360 reported. The article described the development as a “mini-revolution in legal citation.”
The development resonated with appellate lawyers.
The Bluebook is excessively cumbersome, and is mostly a way for a few top law reviews to make money.