Category Archives: Footnotes

Bottomheavy: Legal Footnotes

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As someone who has mined footnotes for years, all I can say is:  Please, sir, I’d like some more.

“Bottomheavy: Legal Footnotes”

JOAN A. MAGAT, Duke University – School of Law

For decades, legal footnotes have been the deserving target of both ample criticism and self-mockery. Apart from their complaints as to footnotes’ mere existence, most critics draw a bead on the ballooning of footnote content. Some journal editors, aspiring to respond to this sound theme, hopefully inform their authors of a preference for “light footnoting.” But where does an author begin to trim, and what editor has the audacity to slash what the author (or her research assistant) has so laboriously compiled below the line? Changing our footnote habits is about benefits and costs. To gain the former, we must ante up. If criticism began the round of bidding, this article modestly raises the stakes, suggesting a rule of reason that might govern the author’s, the editor’s, and the reader’s expectations for footnotes. A gamble, perhaps, but one that might be worth taking.

 

Source:  LSN Law & Rhetoric Vol. 2 No. 90,  12/18/2009

Google, Legal Citations, and Electronic Fickleness: Legal Scholarship in the Digital Environment

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“Google, Legal Citations, and Electronic Fickleness: Legal Scholarship in the Digital Environment”

DANA NEACSU, Columbia University – Diamond Law Library

While law review articles are preserved in fee-based databases such as Westlaw and Lexis and thus are reliably accessible for the future, the footnotes, the source of authority and the body of most law review articles which themselves represent the main part of legal scholarship, usually refer to documents which far too often become inaccessible within a few months after their publication. Both government documents and documents privately published on the Internet have an unreliable life-span. This contradictory approach to digitization raises a large array of questions. Among them, is the following: How does this double digitization (that is, digitizing articles which refer to already-digitized, but unreliably retrieved, prior sources) affect the retrieval of legal information? Whose job is it to preserve legal information? As this is a more complex answer here I will only attempt to show that digitization has created a different environment of legal information (which includes legal scholarship) and this new environment proves to be more elusive that we would like to think about it.

 

Source:  LSN Legal Information & Technology Vol. 1 No. 16,  06/03/2009

Nuts and Bolts of Scholarship – Get it all in a Binder!

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As I was skimming through the latest blog postings on Google Reader, I ran across this entry on “Revisiting the Nuts and Bolts of Scholarship” on Empirical Legal Studies.

The post calls attention to the article THE NUTS AND BOLTS OF SCHOLARSHIP or The “NEW” Rules for Legal Scholars, by Cheryl Hanna (Vermont Law School).  For anyone new to legal academia, this is a handy article offering very useful advice for the new scholar embarking on a writing career.

But, what really, really caught my eye was the advice that Hanna offers, not once, but twice in the article.  She explains:

“One of the most frustrating parts of writing a law review article is doing the footnotes. I suggest that for every article you get a binder. Have your research assistant photocopy everything that you cite. You can then send this binder to the law review editors, saving yourself the problem of remembering where you read something and them the task of pulling sources.”

And, later in the work:

“send the editors your binder of citations. They will instantly love you and work harder on your behalf.”

All I have to say: The Librarians will LOVE you, too!

If all authors supplied a binder to the journals with all of their works cited, what a wonderful world this would be.  Imagine how much more time journal editors would have to really work on the articles and find new content to publish if they weren’t so bogged down in cite-pulls.

And, the fiction of citing to the official version of a code or to the hard copy of a journal would be exposed.  Students regularly come to the reference desk looking for a paper copy of a source that is on-line — the source that the author probably used on-line, too.  If the binder were supplied with all accepted articles, this would be simple and transparent.

Now if only the law journals were to require that all authors submit such a binder…..we can dream.

The Next Generation of Legal Citations Survey, and Authentication and Link Rot Issues

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Link rot is a pet peeve of mine.  A posting I made on June 11, 2008, “Law School Laptop Bans,” already has a broken link to a news story and the posting isn’t even a year old yet.  And I can’t count the number of times I have found a terrific-sounding right-on-point resource in a law review footnote, only to find its URL leads to the dreaded “404 Not Found.”  But it’s more than a pet peeve issue, as this survey makes clear:

“The Next Generation of Legal Citations: A Survey of Internet Citations in the Opinions of the Washington Supreme Court and Washington Appellate Courts, 1999-2005″

Journal of Appellate Practice and Process, Vol. 9, No. 2, Fall 2007

TINA CHING, Seattle University School of Law

As more legal research is conducted online, it is reasonable to conclude that there will be a corresponding increase in citations to the Internet by judges in their opinions. With the widespread public use of the Internet to access information along with the constant changes and impermanence of websites, citing to the Internet should be an issue of increasing concern to the legal community across the country. This paper surveys the types of Internet sources the Washington state Supreme Court and Appellate Court justices are citing. It discusses the interrelated issues of link rot and the impermanence of web pages, citation format, authentication and preservation of online electronic legal information.

 

Source:  LSN Legal Information & Technology Vol. 1 No. 11,  04/29/2009

Justice Ginsburg’s Footnotes

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“Justice Ginsburg’s Footnotes”

New England Law Review, Vol. 43, No. 4, 2009
Boston Univ. School of Law Working Paper No. 09-12

JAY WEXLER, Boston University – School of Law

In this short article written for the New England School of Law’s March Symposium on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I report on what happened when I embarked on a project of trying to read every single footnote Justice Ginsburg has ever written as a justice on the Supreme Court. As the article relates, this project was impossible to complete because Justice Ginsburg, it turns out, has written a lot, lot, lot of footnotes. Instead, I ended up reading all of Justice Ginsburg’s footnotes from three of her terms. In the article, I develop a nine-part taxonomy of Supreme Court footnotes and categorize Justice Ginsburg’s notes according to this taxonomy. The study reveals that, among other things, Justice Ginsburg does not use her footnotes, as some humor writers do, to make jokes. Also, she does not follow in the footsteps of the late, great David Foster Wallace and use footnotes to mirror the fractured nature of reality in her work. Instead, Justice Ginsburg uses footnotes to, for example, provide background information regarding cases under review, point out important aspects of case history, and respond to the arguments of other justices.

Source: LSN Law & Rhetoric Vol. 2 No. 22,  03/20/2009