Create a spot-on reference in Bluebook 21 and 20
What is The Bluebook?
The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation is a manual of style used widely in the United States in the field of law and law research. The name Bluebook is also used to refer specifically to the citation style guide described in the manual.
The latest edition of The Bluebook manual to date is the 21st edition. At the same time, the previous – 20th – edition is still widely used in academic journals.
What are the specifics of Bluebook Style?
The Bluebook is logically divided into two sections: the Bluepages and the Whitepages. The Bluepages section is primarily aimed at law practitioners and clerks, while the Whitepages section provides a detailed style guide for citations in scholarly law reviews and journals.
Grafiati provides the automated referencing opportunities for the Whitepages (Law Reviews) as a tool designed specifically for law researchers.
A specific trait of Bluebook Style is the fact that it does not use any bibliographic references and relies solely on footnotes or endnotes. The structure of footnotes is different for each particular type of source depending on whether it is published or unpublished, print or electronic, and so on. The Bluebook sets different requirements as regards typefaces, positioning of elements in a footnote, etc. for different source types.
As The Bluebook focuses primarily on legal citations, a particular characteristic of this manual is the detailed guide on how the laws, acts, statues, as well as court cases of the United States and other jurisdictions should be cited.
What are the purposes of the Bluebook citation generator Grafiati?
The Bluebook footnote generator developed by Grafiati aims at creating high-quality footnotes in accordance with the requirements of The Bluebook Whitepages style in an automated manner. This simplifies significantly the work of law researchers, as you can cite easily and quickly both secondary sources and legal sources.
The Bluebook citation generator by Grafiati supports both the 21st and the 20th editions of The Bluebook Whitepages.
How Grafiati deals with legal citations?
Legal citations are a weak point of any citation generator. These citations are inherently difficult given the fact that different countries has different legal systems and different traditions of referring to their laws, legal cases, and so on.
In the case of The Bluebook, the situation becomes even more difficult, as the guide is destined specifically for the United States users. Moreover, the guide fails to cover the citations for a great number of jurisdictions outside the US.
Being an international service, Grafiati has implemented a common scheme for citing legal sources based on a combination of the requirements of The Bluebook, OSCOLA, and other sources. This allows identifying reliably the source you are referring to with all of its substantial details. At the same time, if you need to stick specifically to the requirements of The Bluebook, you can use the ‘Complete reference’ source type and add a full citation of a law or any other act formatted in a particular manner.
In the future, we are considering developing individual legal citation algorithms for individual states in order to guarantee an even greater flexibility.
How to use Grafiati for Bluebook footnotes?
Start with our homepage and select any source type you would like to cite. Then, use our catalogues or fill in the details of a source manually. Our Bluebook citation generator will create a footnote in accordance with the requirements of the manual (you can switch between the 21st and the 20th editions of The Bluebook).
We have extended catalogues for the laws of many states that are being updated on a daily basis: using them, you can cite the laws of Austria, Germany, Ukraine, Poland, Spain, and other countries in just one click.
Furthermore, we offer a unique feature of combined in-text citations. Thanks to it, our Bluebook reference generator allows you creating a footnote pointing to multiple sources at once, with these sources ordered in compliance with the requirements of the respective Bluebook edition.