Online content can change or vanish at any moment.
By Jake Rapp, Rose Law Group law clerk and Kathryn Honecker, Rose Law Group chair of Class Action Department
Today, most of us rely more heavily upon online, rather than hard-copy, information sources. Understandably, we are also citing online sources (besides Westlaw or Lexis) more often in our briefs. Along with the influx of online citations, however, has come a myriad of varying citation formats, including the humble “available at” citation to a webpage’s address (URL). We can and must do better.
Fortunately, The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (Columbia Law Review Ass’n et al. eds., 20th ed. 2015) can help. But don’t grab any old Bluebook—get the 20th edition, which provides online source citations in Rule 18.2.