Legal Citations Become [Slightly] Easier

If you are a law student or a lawyer, it is very likely you find legal citation as annoying as I do. Ever since I laid eyes on the Bluebook - the 300+ page legal citation nightmare - I've wanted a more friendly accessible and searchable version. Today I found a way; it's free and perfectly legal to boot.

The Columbia Law Review Association, the organization who publishes the Bluebook, put old versions online for free as PDFs, from version 1 (1926) to version 15 (1991).  To get a searchable version, all you have to do is download version 15, go to a public computer with a copy of Adobe Acrobat Professional (or buy a copy), open the file, document -> ocr text recognition -> recognize text using ocr -> all pages, (wait 20 minutes),  and you're done.

Extra steps you might want to consider include:

• Document -> Reduce File Size (my final version was 7mb)
• Make your PDF into a true "blue" book by adding this PDF custom cover as the first page.  http://bit.ly/cdW5iG.  (Document -> Insert pages)
• Adding bookmarks (click the bookmark icon on each page you want, and type a name)
• Extract the commonly used tables into their own PDFs.  (Document -> Extract Pages)

I know what you're thinking, and you're right.  It's not the most recent version.  But the only significant thing that should have changed in the last 19 years is how to cite online materials, and from what I've heard lawyers don't go out and buy a new Bluebook ones each time they come out with a new one.

Here's the link to Bluebook version 15 (first published in 1991):
www.legalbluebook.com/img/PastVersions/USC15.pdf

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Post Script:
If you're interested in seeing the other versions, just change the two numbers in the link above. (e.g. USC01).  Not counting the cover, the first version was only 26 pages long!  Oh, how things have changed.