Have you ever spent the precious hours just before a deadline frantically proofing your brief, trying to remember if you're supposed to abbreviate governmental, steamship, partnership, or Alaska and flipping through your Bluebook tables to figure out the answer? (To save you some searching: No, yes, yes, no.) This Bluebook Cite Abbreviation Fixer has been designed to help lawyers, law students, and other legal professionals speed up the proofreading on their legal writing. Now, instead of wasting time searching out each and every word in your cite, you can just copy and paste your full citation into this simple tool and it will abbreviate all the words for you.
How the tool works:
- Paste one or more full citations into the top box.
- Click "fix this cite"
- The tool will find and replace any words found in Bluebook v.22 tables 6, 10.1, and 12 and a few other key words with their abbreviations*
- The result will display in the bottom box.
- Copy and paste the corrected cites into your brief (you'll have to add the italics and other formatting manually, sorry!)
Obviously the tool has its limits--most notably, it only checks
abbreviations and doesn't know whether your citation is actually
properly written!
Also, there are few quirky rules that a Python script just can’t handle:
Rule XYZ: “For periodical titles only, the rules in this paragraph
apply. Abbreviate “University” as “U.” (“U. Chi. L. Rev.”). Also, omit
the words “a,” “at,” “in,” “of,” and “the” (but retain the word “on”).
Furthermore, if the title consists of only one word after the words
“a,” “at,” “in,” “of,” and “the” have been omitted, do not abbreviate
the remaining word. Rule 6.1(a) explains the spacing of abbreviations.
Also, where Law is the first word in a title, do not abbreviate it.
But otherwise it should be abbreviated L. And California is always
abbreviated as Cal.—except when it’s not (The California Law Review
should be abbreviated Calif.)
So, in the end, you may still need to consult the Bluebook, but
JohnnyTech hopes this tool helps you have to use it less to perfect
your legal writing!
If you find any errors in the database or have suggestions for improvement, please contact support@bluebook.johnnytech.net
*Other abbreviations this tool will check for: Paragraph and section symbols instead of the words; 2nd to 2d and 3rd to 3d; the abbreviation for U.S.C.; and the names of all major U.S. law schools