Dear Bluebook Editors

Once again, I implore you to consider adding DOIs as an optional part of a citation to law review articles under Rule 16. Every five years, when a new edition of the Bluebook is published, I look forward to the Bluebook moving into the modern era. I appreciate that you ask those of us laboring in the field, hammering out citations to increasingly different publications, for our input about what needs to change. As the years have gone by, the DOI has become completely entrenched as the format for a consistent identifier for scholarly works in most fields outside of the law. The Bluebook needs to embrace DOIs, and integrate them into legal citations. It’s becoming very difficult to avoid using them when citing to scientific works. Increasing numbers of scientific journals have every article start with page 1, making a mockery of the Bluebook distinction between consecutively and nonconsecutively paginated volumes in Rules 16.4/16.5. These newer scientific journals don’t even paginate their issues, just give articles article numbers, for which the Bluebook doesn’t have any kind of direct accommodation for creating a citation. Legal authors trying to cite works from such journals end up not being consistent with one another, since there is no Bluebook rule to clear things up. The authoritativeness of the Bluebook comes from its provision of a way to cite absolutely anything using its rules, creating a right and a wrong citation for everything. Failure to adopt DOI usage weakens that power and makes legal citation less uniform.

As you know, legal scholarship has something to add to every other field, due to the legal and ethical implications of laws and regulations impacting all areas. The contributions of faculty and students to interdisciplinary scholarship are increasing in our complex world. The Bluebook needs to make it possible for these scholarly conversations to continue. Adding a citation format that specifies the use of a DOI would help. Making it mandatory to include the DOI, if one is available, would give law reviews the incentive they need to start minting DOIs for their articles. It would also give faculty the incentive to use them when citing works. They need your leadership to really get started.

I hope I’m not writing to you about this again in five years!

Sincerely,

A Faculty Services Librarian