Legal Writing Justice Thomas goes rogue on the Bluebook with 'cleaned up' citation—to the delight of appellate lawyers
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas went rogue on the Bluebook when he embraced an appellate lawyer’s suggestion for dealing with “citation baggage” that comes with some quoted material. Jack Metzler, an appellate lawyer with the Federal Trade Commission, outlined the problem in an article at SSRN in March 2017. When court decisions and briefs quote from an earlier source, and the earlier source sometimes quotes an even earlier source, the Bluebook rules make for a lot of “citation baggage” that distracts from the point.