First, a disclosure - I was a co-chair of the ALWD Citation Manual Oversight committee and so am not disinterested in the book.

In a hands-on competition between the ALWD Citation Manual and the Bluebook, the ALWD Citation Manual wins hands down. When you try to use each book (the "hands-on" test), the ALWD Citation Manual is simply incomparably superior to the BB.

About three years ago, the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD, variously pronounced "Al Wid" or "All Wood" (I personally prefer the latter)), an organization of more than 200 members representing approximately 150 law schools, undertook the ambitious project of developing and publishing a new legal citation manual. The years of work came to fruition when the ALWD Citation Manual was published. This book, prepared by professionals for professionals, will, I believe, eventually displace The Bluebook.

ALWD Citation Manual and the Bluebook

One of the guiding ideas for the new manual was that it would be, for the most part, a restatement of the rules of citation based on the citation form actually used by experts. As a result of this conservative approach, citation done in the ALWD format will be familiar to practitioners and scholars alike. There are a number of small changes, but the citations will be instantly understood by any lawyer who learned any one (or more) of the 16 different versions of citation promulgated by the 16 different editions of The Bluebook.

Because the learning (and unlearning) to be done is minimal, it will be easy to adapt to either system and to move between them. Those who know The Bluebook will be able to adapt to the ALWD Citation Manual easily; those who learn the ALWD Citation Manual will be able to conform ALWD-compliant work to Bluebook requirements with relatively little additional specialized learning, especially for practitioner documents.

A Teaching Tool

The ALWD Citation Manual is not merely a reference book; it is also a teaching book. The attention paid to making the book much easier to teach from and learn from will make it particularly attractive to those who teach legal citation. Key features furthering this aim are the explicit articulation of a general rule of citation, numerous user-friendly examples of citations of each type of work, and design features that facilitate ease of reading and parsing rules. The book features two color printing; "Sidebars" to explain matters related to citation that are not rules per se; and "Fast Formats," a collection of pages illustrating proper citation form for most types of works. This latter feature will be very useful for someone who knows the citation forms already but needs to double-check some detail. The "fast formats" will also provide students and teachers with a rich source of examples of the application of the rules.

ALWD is maintaining a Web site which will include a ALWD Citation Manual support page to provide answers to frequently asked questions and to update the Manual as needed.

Goals and Features of ALWD Citation Manual

ALWD had a number of aims in creating this citation manual: to simplify some of the rules, to reduce inconsistencies, to make the rules responsive to the needs of lawyers as well as scholars, and, over the long term, to provide stability and uniformity of citation rules.

Among the simplifications, two stand out most prominently. First, how you cite a source does not depend on where you cite it. Gone are the arcane differences that depended upon whether the case was cited in a brief to the court, in a footnote to the text in an academic journal, or in the text proper of a law review article. The citation form in each setting is now the same.

The second major simplification is the elimination of the use of small caps in citations. There are now only two type styles: italics and regular type. If the portion of the cite is not in italics (such as signals and titles), then it is to be in regular type. The ALWD Citation Manual contains a simple list of what to put in italics; everything not on the list is to be in regular type.

Providing stability and uniformity of citation over the long term is important so that the scholars of tomorrow can understand the citations of today. Stability of citation form will also mean that what law students learn today will not be obsolete five years out of school. These goals, seemingly inherent in the very underpinnings of a system of citation, do not appear to have been sufficiently appreciated by the publishers of The Bluebook. Even as these goals were paid lipservice-the subtitle of The Bluebook is "A Uniform System of Citation" after all-the achievement of both stability and uniformity has been frustrated by frequent changes in citation form wrought by the student publishers of The Bluebook over the years.

This is a laudable effort and should prove very helpful to lawyers now and in the future.


Not a new citation system; a better way to learn citation.   May 2, 2002
 20 out of 27 found this review helpful

Disclosure: I am on a committee that promotes the ALWD Citation Manual. But I volunteered for the committee because the ALWD Manual is so good. Students who learn citation from the ALWD Manual will be fine because most of the concerns expressed by critics of the ALWD Manual are based on myths.

Myth 1: Practicing lawyers know the Bluebook. Sorry, but most lawyers don't even own the current Bluebook. Most own the one they got in law school, whether that's the 13th, 14th, 15th, or 16th edition. We're now on the 17th edition. And even then, most lawyers cite according to what they vaguely recall from law school, or they get someone else to do the citations.

Myth 2: Judges require bluebook citation form. Wrong. Most courts DO NOT require Bluebook form. Instead, they require uniform and consistent citations. And most judges would not know Bluebook citations from ALWD Manual citations. The differences are so few and so minor.

Myth 3: Students who learn ALWD Manual form will be in trouble when they go to work on a journal and must use the Bluebook. I doubt it. They will know citation form better because they learned it from a readable, logical manual. What will happen is that they will become disgusted with the Bluebook once they see how poorly written it is.


Never Again . . .   August 1, 2005
 12 out of 27 found this review helpful

I was required to use ALWD's Citation System in law school, in part because one of the professors is a member. However, as I do not work around any of the Courts that use it (e.g. 11th Cir., Montana, the Marshall Islands), then it is absolutely useless.

Everybody else uses Blue Book, and that system is not that hard to learn. Look, if a law student can't learn Blue Book and needs a dumbed down system like ALWD, then they should reconsider their career choice.

However, I assume that the reason why you're buying this is because you have to. Good luck. I found it to be of marginal assistance when I had to use it.


You need this book for legal citation!   December 24, 2003
 10 out of 11 found this review helpful

If you are in law school hopefully you'll have the option to use this book instead of using the Bluebook, it is much easier to understand and it's laid out in a way that is easy to follow. Also the index is very good, which is important in this kind of reference book.

Someone above, shamelessly promoting the CiteIt! program needs to get a clue--you will not (and I mean not have a hope of) make it through your legal citation class using the CiteIt! program alone. If you think you can just plop a big mess into the program and a pristine citiation will drop out the bottom, guess again.

The software is not that good. I'd rate CiteIt about a four on a 10 point scale. It's nice, and it does have some good features, but if you've got to do real-world law school legal citation work to do don't think you can get by with a program alone. At least not anything I've see so far.


More User-Friendly Than Bluebook   November 19, 2006
 8 out of 9 found this review helpful

There are two citation manuals for lawyers: Bluebook, which has been around for several years and is compiled by the Harvard Law Review, and ALWD, which was recently developed by the Association of Legal Writing Directors.

As a current law student, I had the benefit of approaching ALWD without ever having used Bluebook. I have since used both ALWD and Bluebook, and I find ALWD to be much more user-friendly. ALWD and Bluebook are identical in many respects, but finding citation rules in ALWD is more intuitive. For a law student who has to refer often to citation rules, ease of use is a definite benefit.

Having said that, there have been occasions where ALWD has not contained the information that I have needed, so I have had to refer to Bluebook. While Bluebook seems to be more comprehensive, ALWD is easier to use for all but the most esoteric citation rules. Thus, ALWD is not a replacement for Blue Book so much as it is a companion to it.