Glancing at newly arrived law review issues, an article in the just-received Seton Hall Legislative Journal caught my eye.  It’s “The Doomsday Suction: Disaster Management in the Age of Homeland Security,” by Thomas Nosewicz.  It caught my eye because its author, Tom Nosewicz, is not just one of our former students, but one of our top-top-top former students.  So I took a close look at Tom’s article and, in particular, its footnotes.

Not counting Id or Supra references, Tom’s article has 49 footnotes.  Of these 49 footnotes, 35 are to URLs — i.e., he’s citing to Internet sources. 

The footnotes that cite to print sources include two monographs (presumably not available online).  Tom also cites to New York Times and Washington Post stories as print, but my guess is that he found them online but cited to them as if he used the paper.  Tom also cites to the United States Code and Statutes at Large; here, too, I’m guessing that Tom is following the Bluebook convention, a fiction, really, and used online sources for these laws.

Except for the two books, I doubt that Tom really had to get out of his chair to write this very good article.

It makes me wonder:  Do law review cite-checkers still ask for paper copies of cited references?  Our law review stopped this silly practice years ago.

Tom’s a great writer and thinker, by the way.  Look at his article’s last sentence:

This Article has shown the problems that arise when the two different missions of terrorism and natural disaster emergency management are lumped together: a cycle of eschatological panic about low-probability terrorist attacks siphons money and other resources away from preparedness for ploddingly predictable natural disasters.