Academic Legal Writing - Eugene Volokh [156]
The only way you can master the Bluebook is by reading it carefully and repeatedly, and by marking (with post-its, for example) those items that you found most surprising, and that you think you'll most need to be reminded of during the competition. You will then (a) have a good sense of the rules; (b) understand the general logic behind the rules (not all the rules are explicable using a general logical principle, but some are); and (c) have seen enough of the examples in the Bluebook that you might more easily notice when something departs from the Bluebook rules.
Pay particularly close attention to the bluebooking rules related to (1) cases, (2) statutes and constitutions, (3) articles, (4) books, (5) short forms, and (6) citation signals. If you can read the Bluebook cover to cover once, and then read these especially important rules again, you'll be in good shape. If you can't do that much, but can at least skim most of the Bluebook and pay close attention to the especially important parts, that's a lot better than nothing.
Students I've corresponded with agree: “I found particularly helpful ... the advice about thoroughly reading the Bluebook. My familiarity with it by the time the competition started made the cite-checking MUCH easier for me.” “The most helpful advice [in this chapter] is on the Bluebook—reviewing the Bluebook BEFORE the competition begins and tabbing the book.”
Your bluebooking skills will likely be a big part of your grade, both on your editing assignment and your main assignment. (Many of the law reviews that have separate editing assignments count them for 20-30% of the final grade.) The law review, after all, is looking for people who'll be good cite-checkers, and part of a cite-checker's job is bluebooking.
The law review is also looking for people who are diligent, and who are attentive to detail. If you weren't willing or able to put in the effort to properly bluebook your own work, when the result affects your professional future, the editors will reasonably assume that you probably won't do a good job bluebooking others' work, when you're on the law review and have no personal stake in getting things right.
Bluebooking is also the part of the competition where success is most within your control. Evaluations of the substance are subjective, so a difference of perspective between you and the editors can lose you a lot of points (even though the editors are trying hard to be fair). But care and precision in following the bluebooking rules is much more objective; if you bluebook well, you'll get a good grade on that part of the assignment.
I have my quarrels with the Bluebook. I think it's often helpful to depart from some of the rules, and I've had fights with law review editors about that. You may have similar objections.
Save them for when you're an editor or an author. During the competition, follow the Bluebook word for word. And before the competition, read it again and again.
3. Check past competitions
A couple of weeks before the competition, see whether past competitions are available. Read them, just to get a feel for what's going on. If some model answers are available, pay particularly close attention to them. (A student reports: “I found [this suggestion] incredibly helpful, because [reading past submissions] gave me a sense of what [editors] were looking for, yet ... also made [me] realize that there was not one ‘right’ way to organize it.”)
If no model answers are available, see whether friends of yours who wrote on to the law review in past years can give you copies of their old competition papers. They may want to