Studying Blue Book Before Law School Forum

[hangnail]

Perhaps I don't see anything about this because it's a crazy idea but might it be useful to begin reviewing the Blue Book/reading law review articles and trying to understand citations and writing style before law school? Might it help with preparing for writing competitions or (even better) for exams (not content-wise but style-wise)?

[Anciano]

No.

[rad lulz]

Do it. I'd memorize all the Table 6 abbreviations. It can only help

[hephaestus]

Absolutely not.

[GertrudePerkins]

I've never heard of any professor expecting anything like Bluebooked citations on an exam, so it won't help you with that.

reading law review articles is considerably less crazy than reading the Bluebook, but I still wouldn't do it as a form of preparation. Do it if you actually are interested in the content of the article, but bear in mind that 98% of law review articles are bad.

[kaiser]

No. Just...no

[FKASunny]

Wait, I can't just do MLA?

[ru2486]

hang yourself instead

[GatorEagle1]

It'd be an awesome idea to memorize all of the cites to the foreign jurisdictions. You never know when you will need to cite the upper court of the western district of Nepal.

[kaiser]

It'd be an awesome idea to memorize all of the cites to the foreign jurisdictions. You never know when you will need to cite the upper court of the western district of Nepal.

You gotta know that if you wanna practice BigSherpaLaw

[A. Nony Mouse]

The other thing that's wrong with this idea (among many) is that law review writing "style" is not "legal writing." If you're on LR, yes, you need to write a note (law review article) so you'll want to get a sense of what one looks like during 2L. But everything else you will ever write in law should NOT look like a law review article, including your exams. So studying LR articles before law school is not going help you. (Caveat: unless you are gunning for academia and plan to write a LR article, like, every year you're in school. But generally speaking this will be worse than useless.)

[Richie Tenenbaum]

If you want to gun at lrw, go for it. It's a weird thing to do though. And reading the bluebook isn't going to help much (it certainly won't affect your writing ability). If you want to work on your writing, get volokh's academiclegal writing and something written by bryan garner.

[kalvano]

There's an index in the back. Why memorize crap that you can look up in seconds?

[Dr. Dre]

hang yourself instead

[quiver]

Do it. I'd memorize all the Table 6 abbreviations. It can only help

Agreed. I can't tell you how many times I've been writing an exam and needed to look up the abbreviation for "Steamship." I'm pretty sure it cost me an A in my Law & Mark Twain class.

[ChaseInk]

Wow. Wow. Wow...

Get the online version. Word search.

[Bronck]

This has gotta be a troll

[TheBiggerMediocre]

I used to read law review articles then I realized they were all speculative...

[Scotusnerd]

Perhaps I don't see anything about this because it's a crazy idea but might it be useful to begin reviewing the Blue Book/reading law review articles and trying to understand citations and writing style before law school? Might it help with preparing for writing competitions or (even better) for exams (not content-wise but style-wise)?

You have got to be kidding me. No. Go out and get some beers. There is absolutely no point in getting to know that horrid thing before you have to. You will not be any better prepared, trust me.

[hephaestus]

It'd be an awesome idea to memorize all of the cites to the foreign jurisdictions. You never know when you will need to cite the upper court of the western district of Nepal.

You gotta know that if you wanna practice BigSherpaLaw

Highly underrated comment.

[bjsesq]

Remove the wire binding that holds the blue book together. Straighten it out and file one end to a sharp point. Done? Good. Now jam it in your fucking eye.