New law students want their predecessors’ work to look obsolete. It’s the theory first elaborated by the social philosopher Thorstein Veblen: planned obsolescence. Veblen postulated that companies deliberately produce consumer goods that will become outdated after limited use so that consumers will have to buy new items more often.I'm not convinced that law students feel a desire to "leave their mark" with changes in citation form. Anyone who is meticulous about citation form ought to feel bad about changes that make older volumes of the journal different from the new. The most important thing about form is consistency. Pick a form and then stick to it. I have various things like that on this blog, certain punctuation, capitalization, and grammatical preferences that have been established. The interest in formal consistency now vastly outweighs all the various factors that went into the original decision. For example, I capitalize "Justice" but not "judge." And in a sentence like "The five men blew their nose," I am never going to change that "nose" to "noses," no matter how many times Meade says "Shouldn't that be 'noses'?" I just say, "That's that thing again," meaning that's that point of grammar I resolved long ago.
You see the principle at work with smartphone chargers (your old ones won’t work on your new gear), iPod connections (ditto), lightbulbs and even coursebooks. Legal publishers like frequent editions so as to avoid the forgone profits represented by a secondhand market.
And so it is with The Bluebook. Things shift from edition to edition—every five years or so—in response to nothing but the itch of a new crop of law students to leave their mark on their venerated citation guide.
I wish Death Cab For Cutie had followed my grammatical preference in the lovely song "I Will Follow You Into The Dark," which has the great, but flawed, line: "If Heaven and Hell decide/That they both are satisfied/Illuminate the no's on their vacancy signs." If it were "Illuminate the no on their vacancy sign," listeners would be spared the no's/nose homophone. Each afterlife domain has only one sign, and each sign has only one no that can be illuminated when there is no vacancy, so the singular makes sense and avoids confusion. I learned that long ago from a teacher who knew it was better to say to us students "Use your head," not "Use your heads."
But back to "The Bluebook." I think Garner got closer to the truth when he said "Legal publishers like frequent editions so as to avoid the forgone profits represented by a secondhand market." When you're an editor, you have to resist stepping on the writer's stylistic choices. But I'd just like to say, I'd never have written the sentence like that. Garner is using that verbose, 19th century style of rhetoric that W.C. Fields made fun of in the early 20th century. And in doing so, he's making it easier to overlook the truth — what I think is the truth — that is lost in the musings about the psychology of cite-checking law students. I'd have written: The new editions of The Bluebook are a scheme to extract money from students, and students not only pay for new books, they pay in the time and effort it takes to learn the piddling new rules.
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48 comments:
Lightbulbs?
In 30+ years of practice in NJ (about 50% litigation), I'd say that more than 95% of citations are to prior cases. I have not looked at the blue book once since I left law school. I have never heard a Judge comment about a citation form (either mine or my adversaries).
"The new editions of The Bluebook are a scheme to extract money from students...."
That's Capitalism!
"The new editions of The Bluebook are a scheme to extract money from students..."
Change "The new editions of The Bluebook" to "law school."
"Robert Cook said...
"The new editions of The Bluebook are a scheme to extract money from students...."
That's Capitalism!"
Hardly. The state (Government school) is mandating a specific book. It's socialism you moron.
I say it's editors and such who want to leave their mark. Why was it otherwise necessary to even come up with ALWD?
"I think Garner got closer to the truth when he said 'Legal publishers like frequent editions so as to avoid the forgone profits represented by a secondhand market.'"
Capitalism! Hooray!
Robert Cook said...
"I think Garner got closer to the truth when he said 'Legal publishers like frequent editions so as to avoid the forgone profits represented by a secondhand market.'"
Isn't this true of all textbooks to some extent.
Sorry about that - Cook was quoting.
That was Tank making a citation mistake on this post about citation forms.
When it comes to citations in any field, I would tend to agree that consistency over time should trump optimization; it's a case where having standards is so superior to not having them (or to having inconsistent or ambiguous ones) that "just leave it alone" seems best. (Although I can't help but cringe at "The five men blew their nose").
The subject of planned obsolescence is larger, as it's seldom clear what is meant by it. Many seem to think it refers to designing physical products to have a short life so you'll have to buy another sooner than you wanted to, yet in a competitive market if a product fails sooner than you expected to you probably will buy a replacement from someone else, and where's the benefit to the seller from that? What's more likely is that the product's durability was poor because it cost less to make it that way.
As for smartphone chargers and such, the war is between attempts at vendor lock-in (use a proprietary connector) vs. industry-wide compatibility and in these wars, vendor lock-in often loses because consumers prefer compatibility. Thus the near-universal use of USB chargers (although Apple tends to be an outlier, using its market power to keep consumers within its "walled garden"). And sometimes compatibility comes at an unreasonably high cost; for example, forcing LED lighting into the shape of an Edison light bulb is limiting and makes it more difficult to achieve long life because of the difficulty in removing heat from the LEDs and driver circuits.
Regarding textbooks, well, since there is no secondhand market for e-books, perhaps that will finally solve the problem of needless revisions?
There are no price gougers like textbook publishers.
I recall an algebra textbook where the publishers were so concerned with copyright violations or were justifying new editions that expressions were left unsimplified but repeatedly referenced by the authors. I know it caused some kids to struggle.
It is 8th Cir. Not CA 8. Or whatever is used today.
Isn't it only Apple that changed their smartphone charger in recent years? Basically because their slavish cult will accept any abuse?
Capitalism! Hooray!
Universities are almost completely shielded from free markets, what you should be saying is "Heavily regulated and protected from competition! Hooray!"
And in a sentence like "The five men blew their nose," I am never going to change that "nose" to "noses," no matter how many times Meade says "Shouldn't that be 'noses'?"
How about "The five women blew their husband"?
"Let's dump tons of subsidy money into higher education in the form of loans to people too young to understand them then find ways to extract that money! Yay heavily regulated markets with massive govt intervention!"
So, you are sometimes stubbornly resistant to proper usage with respect to plurals. Foolish consistency. How about the greengrocer's apostrophe? Do you have a facile justification for that as well?
Absurd changes. Seems more about power and control. Though, maybe it's also a way of sharpening research skills. A lawyer needs to know how to keep up with constantly shifting laws and cite the newest version. Lawyers are always fiddling with the laws, so are politicians and judges and whoever else is able.
Student fiddling also makes sense in contexts where students are the editors of the journals. I never have gotten why that is. What other field puts its scholarship in the hands of the still-being-educated?
Here on my side of academia we use Chicago style footnotes, which has updates but retains a broad consistency for common texts. Different fields use different styles, but they stay the same.
Big deal. The actual law is often re-written these days by reform panels of one lawyer, one Judge, one consumer expert, and three versions of blacks, gays and feminists so we can all glory in silly changes for change's sake.
The net effect is selling new books, new seminars, and young new law school grads/lawyers understanding the new Code better than the old lawyers who have to erase a career's knowledge and relearn the silly little changes.
As a Chemist, our CDC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics is issued annually. It is a point of some snobbery to have on your bookshelf as early a version as one is entitled to own, say, from one's first year of high school.
And if that just happens to be from a year before the Handbook went from the small pages to the large ones, all the better.
The older versions from the 1960s don't have the same info content as the newer ones, of course, so getting another one to actually use every few years is also allowed.
I think Garner is correct.
Do the students who come up with these trivial changes get to keep the money the Bluebook sells for? If not, why would they participate4 in this supposed money-making scheme? My guess, based on some experience of having my work mangled by student editors, is that they just like messing around with this kind of triviality.
Smilin' Jack at 9:15 stated concisely and perfectly the 3 paragraphs I had planned to write.
Our hostess is right about the no on their vacancy signs and wrong about their noses.
.....blew their wives.....hahaha....for a moment, I had thought I was reading Laslo.
-Krumhorn
Who knew that Althouse was a Death Cab for Cutie aficionado.
"How about "The five women blew their husband"?"
That is such a good question that there should be no answer. It is a question. The question is all. It would only diminish the question to purport to answer it.
As an editing question, the solution is to rewrite the whole sentence to avoid the problem.
The man's five wives blew him.
OR
Each of the five wives blew her husband.
I once worked for a lawyer who made our lives miserable by adding or subtracting punctuation marks to his heart’s content & who found a significant difference in things like “I am of opinion” & I am of the opinion”. Unlike me, most of his serfs though that such standards were pour encourager les autres. I thought it pour le sport .
Anyway, it was Talmudical.
Richard Russo, has a character everybody refers to (behind his back, of course) as “Or She” because the character constantly suggests that that those words be added to sentences like “If there are any questions, he should contact….”
(Some editors would change my previous sentence to “to whom everybody refers”.)
And the beat goes on.
My guy & many an editor or guy higher up the food chain in whatever organization I found myself in (OOPS: in which I found myself) were wont to say that he (or she) was one who “cares about” writing. As someone once noted: funny, I often found that a polite way of saying “I like to correct the writing of others.” Hey, most of us who are educated care about writing, but the degree that one is willing to belittle others should not be the test of how much one cares about writing.
And while I of course try to avoid legalese or logorrhea (diarrhea of the mouth) or run-on sentences, I do not spoon-feed or write everything in Basic English when I’m blogging or e-mailing on a serious topic to post-HS guys. Plain speech in such circumstances does not mean meeting a Gunning Fog-Index “8”.
And, I do find it frustrating that when I answer with a short e-mail or blog reply, I’m accused by some of being superficial, & when I answer with a long, fact-full & fancy-free e-mail or blog post, lightened with some irony, hyperbole, understatement, metaphor, analogy, bathos, puns, parody, satire, litotes, and sarcasm, I’m accused of ranting. No respect!
BTW, my embellishment of a description of using the rules of grammatical handbooks to simple e-mails & blog comments: obviously, basic rules of grammar & spelling should be followed as an indication that the writer is intelligent as well as a courtesy to & a sign of respect for to the reader, but whimsical shibboleths involving gerunds, punctuation, clichés, etc. seem stuffy regarding such informal writing.
I’m not an uninspired scrivener who confuses a breezy manner with genius. Nor am I a pompous ass who repeats tired nostrums in wooden prose.
PS: Did you hear about the Magician who said “abradacrabra” & nothing happened? He was a poor speller.
I don't know about the afterlife, but on earth most motels have 2 or 3 vacancy signs: one at the office and one at the street, and sometimes one for traffic coming from the right and another for traffic from the left.
There will need to be at least one more Bluebok edition, when the digital law library is complete and all citations must be hyperlinked.
OOPS
Make that "serfs thought"
Self editing can be dangerous
'And in a sentence like "The five men blew their nose," I am never going to change that "nose" to "noses," no matter how many times Meade says "Shouldn't that be 'noses'?" . . . I learned that long ago from a teacher who knew it was better to say to us students "Use your head," not "Use your heads."'
Meade's right, Althouse is wrong. The two examples are not the same. The teacher who says "Use your head" is giving a sentence of instruction to a group of individual students, each of whom has only one head to use. The sentence about noses is not addressed to anybody in particular. It's a descriptive sentence providing a factual account of events -- that is, five men blew five noses, not one nose. Without the plural "noses," the sentence is factually false.
What's worse, it's bad writing. Good writing uses clean, accurate prose with no stumbling blocks, so the reader can easily grasp the meaning and move on. Taking the plural out of the word "nose" sets a trap that distracts from meaning and risks making the reader wonder, "Wait, five men, one nose, where's the s, is this a typo, what went wrong here, doesn't anybody hire editors any more?" Result: reader distracted and grumpy, writer's authority diminished, meaning lost.
As for the song line about the no vacancy sign, it's awkward no matter which way you put it. The whole line needs rewriting.
Smilin' Jack made the same point much more succinctly, I see.
Krumhorn said...
Smilin' Jack at 9:15 stated concisely and perfectly the 3 paragraphs I had planned to write.
Our hostess is right about the no on their vacancy signs and wrong about their noses.
It's not really about grammar...I was just trying to get Althouse to endorse polygamy.
Time was - not so very many years ago - when toilet innards were pretty much standard. Nowadays we have various schemes to achieve the requirement to reduce liters per flush by 20% (and the practical result of needing two flushes to get the job done. Takes 20 minutes research to find the correct part number and 20 minutes at the hardware store looking for the part - if they have it at all.
Fortunately, can still find a cork and funnel for my modern "no spill" gas cans.
It's not capitalism or socialism. It predates both. It is rent seeking and harks back to the days when a monarch could grant a patent that allowed only one person to print books, publish music, or make vodka--by appointment to Her Majesty.
From Inwood:
I feel your pain. I was paralegal for years in a practice area that had us doing most of the writing. The intended audience was civil servants (USCIS adjudicators), NOT judges, so the leagalese was toned down a bit - plain language with citations to point to the law. USCIS forms often require attachments with text elaborating some point - so there were lots of short, descriptive paragraphs in plain language.
New, just-out-of-law-school attorneys will take a simple 4 sentence paragraph describing job duties, maybe describing how a Sr. Software Engineer will delegate tasks, and rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite....eventually coming around to the same wording they started with! And it gets worse: I give them hard copy, they mark it up, I redo it, give them hard copy, they mark it up, I redo it and give them hard copy, more edits...and finally, it reads the same way it did in the beginning. Total time spent on 4 sentences: up to an hour!
They brainwash students so deeply some come out of law school with some sort of compulsion to re-work writing over and over - it just can't be good writing unless you do, right?
While it is grammatically correct to write or say "it was better to say to us [something]....", when identifying who the "us" is, e.g., "we [who are] students", the grammatically correct construction is, I believe, "it was better to say to we students [that something]....".
My experience with the Blue Book and the Texas Rules of Form (I'm from Texas) is similar to Tank's. I worried about proper form for a while out of law school, but I soon realized I was mostly alone in that. Perhaps my experience would have been different if I primarily handled appeals, but the Blue Book to me now seems quaint.
The most used book on physical diagnosis by medical students does the same thing. They even rearrange chapters to they can't follow the same order. Physical diagnosis is mostly 19th century technology and doesn't change. Well, it's only the 11th edition but it's $90.
"The man's five wives blew him.
OR
Each of the five wives blew her husband."
And THIS is why I hang around Althouse.
I am Laslo.
"It is a point of some snobbery to have on your bookshelf as early a version as one is entitled to own, say, from one's first year of high school."
I have one !
+1 Handbook. Mine is only a 1989 or was that a 1986?
Taking the plural out of the word "nose" sets a trap that distracts from meaning
I think Althouse may have been given what for by a professional. But Althouse is writing a blog, and little distractions from the meaning are her shtick.
Interesting. In science, it's almost exactly the opposite. Every paper I've ever written has been in LaTex, which does citations for you automatically. You write out a BibTex file with entries like
@article{einstein1935can,
title={Can quantum-mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete?},
author={Einstein, Albert and Podolsky, Boris and Rosen, Nathan},
journal={Physical review},
volume={47},
number={10},
pages={777},
year={1935},
publisher={APS}
}
and cite it in your paper with \cite{einstein1935can}. The journal is in charge of converting that into the house style, which is usually done automatically in standard formats (the one I use by default is put out by Physical Review). So unless the journal is doing something crazy, you never even need to learn the correct format.
Given that courts can be incredibly picky about correct formats, I'm surprised that nobody has bothered to come up with a system like this. Although I should note that Donald Knuth, who came up with the Tex typesetting system, is a cult figure in computer science -- how many other programs from 1984 (!) can you think of that are still in daily use in essentially their original form?
With Google Scholar, you don't even have to look the bibliographic information up -- there's a link that will give you a BibTex entry right next to the search result.
Why on Earth would you have a human do that stuff?
Ken, I thought royal warrants and such were more likely endorsements, i.e. buy Colman's mustard, by appointment to the Queen. Doesn't mean you can't buy Cheesewick's mustard or Nathan's, but then you will not be eating the same mustard as QE2.
Tim, her shtick is, she likes what's bad. Distractible, extremely, she is a hummingbird, and petty, but chiefly, she likes what's bad. That's because she's sooo special: in a word, any Mundane can like what's good. She doesn't read Ayn Rand because she doesn't want to recognize herself in people like Ellsworth Toohey.
Peter said...8/4/15, 8:42 AM
yet in a competitive market if a product fails sooner than you expected to you probably will buy a replacement from someone else, and where's the benefit to the seller from that?
This makes sense when you have a monopoly, or, in the case of textbooks, where your biggest competition will second-hand copies of your own book, and people are buyinbg them only because it is assigned, or because instructions in class to read material pages or answer questions gve page numbers.
It also is a benefit to the government of China in the case of products made in China. The same manufacturer may not make the replacement, but it earns foreign exchange and the government can pass instructioons down to companies (enforced by state banks who make loans to companies) not to make products any better than they have to be.
What's more likely is that the product's durability was poor because it cost less to make it that way.
I really don't believe so in the cas of products made in China. Sometimes the difference in cost is almost infintisimal.
As for smartphone chargers and such, the war is between attempts at vendor lock-in (use a proprietary connector) vs. industry-wide compatibility and in these wars, vendor lock-in often loses because consumers prefer compatibility. Thus the near-universal use of USB chargers (although Apple tends to be an outlier, using its market power to keep consumers within its "walled garden").
The question is, though, when there is vendor lock-in, why the vendor wants changes things in the latest model. That would be maybe because of competition from clones of the charger - a compatible charger has by then, been made by other companies.
sometimes compatibility comes at an unreasonably high cost; for example, forcing LED lighting into the shape of an Edison light bulb is limiting and makes it more difficult to achieve long life because of the difficulty in removing heat from the LEDs and driver circuits.
You're not going to get people to replace all their outlets to a non-sdtandard one just to get a more efficient lightbulb.
Regarding textbooks, well, since there is no secondhand market for e-books, perhaps that will finally solve the problem of needless revisions? It still could be re-used. What may make a difference is that page numbers don't matter much any more.
Also, one reason for e-books is immediate delivery. If not for that issue, they could be re-sold, at least on a small scale. Although most likely, it would be given away free.
Michael K @ 8/4/15, 5:13 PM
The most used book on physical diagnosis by medical students does the same thing. They even rearrange chapters to they can't follow the same order. Physical diagnosis is mostly 19th century technology and doesn't change.
Isn't it about time somebody made a conversion table, or could that be too difficult because the contents of the chapters have also been re-arranged? And maybe there are new diagrams, tables, and illustrations?
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