Law Review Footnotes
posted by Adam Kolber
In a recent post, Frank Pasquale notes that there is little variation in the kinds of hyperlinks one can create on the internet. I have made a similar complaint but for a much older technology: the law review footnote.
An important complexity in writing for law reviews is that, typically, one-third of the writing consists of footnote text. But, who knows whether people actually read the footnotes and how consistently they do so? Some people say that everything important should be in the text. Perhaps. But lots of people seem to use footnotes to provide information or to limit claims in ways that seem rather important. Furthermore, this more important material seems to pop up out of the blue among a sea of string cites that one might not otherwise plod through. Moreover, not knowing how one’s piece will be read makes it hard to know how to write it. Legal scholarship is a “Choose Your Own Adventure” Story.
We could have more descriptive footnotes (some underlined, double underlined, circled, etc.) that could differentiate between footnotes intended to merely provide a source and footnotes intended to explain or limit something in the text. Not that I recommend it, but we could even have the dreaded “red flag” footnote that Frank mentions to indicate that a piece is being cited for its errors. It would be like a “but see” citation, only quicker and easier to discover. Yikes, imagine what controversy those citation counts would create!
December 12, 2007 at 9:06 pm
Posted in: Law School
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Responses (1)
Jason - December 13, 2007 at 11:40 am
Complicating the issue is the question of how people are reading the articles — for things on Lexis or Westlaw, I almost never see the footnotes, but when I’m reading from Hein or SSRN or something (so that there are actual footnotes instead of endnotes), I at least glance downward to see if anything (like a block of text) catches my eye.
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