[MLZ] Bluebook Style: Minor Issues with citing cases

danepps

I'm using the Bluebook style for citing cases and so far I'm loving it. I've identified a couple of minor issues related to citing cases as subsequent cites. In the Bluebook, when a case is cited for the second time more than five footnotes after the previous cite, it is supposed to be cited in full form. So, with a pincite, it would look like this: "Mistretta v. United States, 488 U.S. 361, 367 (1988)." I've discovered two ways in which the style may need minor tweaks:

(a) When the citation is created for the first time, the style inserts an "at" incorrectly thus: "Mistretta v. United States, 488 U.S. 361, at 367 (1988)." While the "at" is required for short form cites (E.g., "Mistretta, 488 U.S. at 367" it should not show up in the full cite. (This may be caused by a fix that I had suggested over the weekend, because the "at" was not showing up at all even for true short-form cites.).

(b) when footnotes get moved, such that a short-form case cite is moved to be more than five footnotes away from the earlier citation (and thus should be changed to a full cite, after refreshing MLZ on my computer is now turning the entire full citation into italics: "Mistretta v. United States, 488 U.S. 361, at 367 (1988)."

any thoughts on these?

fbennett

I'm not able to reproduce either of those errors locally. The first should never happen. I don't think we've ever seen the second before. The style certainly won't do that; it sounds like the word processor may be messing up.

What happens if you select all, paste the text into a freshly created document, then refresh?

If that doesn't help, let me know the OS and the word processor, and I'll see if I can scare up a local system to experiment with.

danepps

Select all and pasting into a new word processor doesn't fix the problem. The first problem shows up for me consistently, whenever I enter a case cite with a pincite page and the case was previously cited but more than five footnotes ago.

I think the second error must be a problem with Word, and not the style itself, because it only crops up when, because of moving footnotes around, a short form cite (that was italic) suddenly becomes a long-form (not italic) and for some reason the updated cite picks up the italics.

I'm using Mac OS X 10.9.3 and Microsoft Word for Mac 2011. I will try to replicate the first problem on a Windows machine later today.

fbennett

The first issue was a bug in the style. It's now been fixed, and the change has been mapped across to all MLZ styles that use the Bluebook cite forms for US legal materials:
MLZ Bluebook Style
MLZ Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation, 7th ed. (McGill Guide)
MLZ Chicago Manual of Style (Full Note)
MLZ OSCOLA - Oxford Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities
MLZ Manuel canadien de la référence juridique 7e éd. CSL1.1mlz1 (Note et bibliographie)
MLZ Taiwanese Law Style
New Zealand Law Style Guide (MLZ)
MLZ 法律編集者懇話会

Users of these styles should update by reinstalling them from CitationStylist to get correct backreferences to US law cases.

@danepps: Thanks for reporting the fault!