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I need to write a paper conforming with the blue book standards.

Has there been any move on creating packages that support blue book-style formatting and citations? Or should I get ready to do a bunch of work on my own bibtex and article classes?

If the latter, are there modern alternatives to bibtex? Are there any specific modern approaches to customised article classes?

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    In my experience the number of LaTeX users in the legal field (even in academia) is vanishingly small. There is a very powerful alternative to bibtex in the biber+biblatex combination, but I don't think anyone has tackled this particular problem. Legal citations are informationally quite different from other academic citations (even those in the Humanities). But if the standards are well described, it should be possible to create some biblatex styles for them. See bibtex vs. biber and biblatex vs natbib for more information on biblatex.
    – Alan Munn
    Commented Sep 12, 2012 at 18:26
  • @AlanMunn Thanks, I will check those out. I'm only using latex because I'm a transplanted software engineer in the world of law. Still amazes me that people use WP software they hate.
    – Marcin
    Commented Sep 12, 2012 at 18:30
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    More than 6 years later, I would still love to have a resource like this! like many legal tasks though, I guess I should be grateful it's so complicated to computerize that it still makes sense to pay lawyers.
    – vastra360
    Commented Jan 30, 2019 at 19:09
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    I realize this is an old post but would love to hear if there are any updates on the matter? That is: 1) Anyway to import a bibtex library using Bluebook citation; 2) Anyway to incorporate the Bluebook citation into the body of the article (same as for instance in Econ...) [I use Jabref but if something is better for this purpose I would appreciate learning! Thanks!]
    – Julie
    Commented Aug 19, 2019 at 14:43
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    @Julie I don't think there's anything more that has happened since. My original comment still stands: there really don't seem to be enough LaTeX users in the legal world for someone to have created such a package.
    – Alan Munn
    Commented Aug 19, 2019 at 15:11

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I don't know of any Bluebook style, and I think I would if it existed. Given the notorious complexities of the Bluebook it would have to be a biblatex project, and it would be quite a project! In the common law world, I know there is a written-and-working-but-unreleased version of the McGill style for Canadian authorities, there's a partially compete Australian style, and there's an English style based on OSCOLA, which is on CTAN. None of them is Bluebook conformant. The one that I think is closest to complete (which is OSCOLA -- but (disclaimer!) I wrote it so I suffer parental bias) might provide a start -- but it would only be a sort of "inspiration" start, rather than a "much of the legwork is done" start: also it's hardly a stable package.

Implementation of a subset of the Bluebook (say books, articles, cases and perhaps the Constitution and USC) wouldn't probably be too much of a struggle. Implementing the whole thing would be a mammoth task. How mammoth would depend on how far you sought to automate things like abbreviations, cite signals, citation order and the like.

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  • Thanks very much. I'll take a look. I'm looking at this for a specific paper, which will probably reference articles, US statutes, US cases, non-US cases, non-US statutes, and arbitration awards. Whatever I produce will probably only deal with those.
    – Marcin
    Commented Sep 12, 2012 at 19:03
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    If I can help in any way, I'd be happy to. Just a warning: I discovered my email in the OSCOLA documentation is wrong! Just pstanley not p.stanley. What a typo ...
    – Paul Stanley
    Commented Sep 12, 2012 at 19:10
  • Thank you! I'll tackle the issue, then let you know if I have any questions.
    – Marcin
    Commented Sep 12, 2012 at 19:18
  • In the end...I just used Word, and did the citations by hand. Ho hum.
    – Marcin
    Commented Sep 19, 2013 at 21:10
  • @PaulStanley -- Do you have any more information regarding the status of the McGill style? I have begun to write a McGill style for my own needs, but it is very much ad hoc and therefore incomplete.
    – jon
    Commented Nov 29, 2015 at 22:50
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Have you tried Lawtex? I just found it https://sourceforge.net/projects/lawtex/ I don't think it has been recently improved but I think it is a good starting point for anyone who want to develop further. Perhaps somebody familiar with Bluebook can tell us what is missing or incorrect. Thanks.

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Now in 2020 packages with current maintenance and Bluebook support include:

biblatex-chicago: see CTAN

lawcite: see lawcite on GitHub

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