Yes! The citations that result from using the Guide are identical to legal citations advanced in the twenty-first edition of The Bluebook. Experienced practitioners and scholars alike will instantly recognize that the citations resulting from the Guide’s principles are indistinguishable from citations that result from using other citation manuals, but that they complete those citations more efficiently using the Guide’s approach.

This is graphically illustrated through Appendix 8, which is a new feature in the seventh edition of the Guide. Rules 1-40 and Appendix 6 of the seventh edition have callout numbers after some of the sentences in those rules. Those callout numbers correspond to those in Appendix 8 and cross-reference the information in the text of the Guide to the corresponding rule in the twenty-first edition of The Bluebook. In other words, if The Bluebook has a corresponding rule, or even an example that supports the explicit rule explanation in the Guide, Appendix 8 indicates those citations to the current edition of The Bluebook. Thus, law students and law reviews can use the Guide confident that the resulting citations are commensurate with other manuals while simultaneously eliminating the burden of slogging through those manuals’ incomprehensible rules that require a fair amount of intuition.

While the citations from the early editions of the Guide—called the ALWD Citation Manual—did not conform to Bluebook, the citation rules in later versions produce identical citations. This is partially true because as a result of those first editions, the Bluebook added the blue pages in an attempt to finally address its major weakness that it was impractical for practitioners. Without a competitor, Bluebook had no incentive to improve. Still, isolating rules into practitioner pages and scholarly pages makes creating citations unwieldy compared to the Guide’s integrated approach.

No. The Guide seamlessly integrates the citation rules used in practice-based documents with those used in academic footnotes.  This single set of rules enable novice and experienced legal writers to easily and efficiently cite a variety of legal sources without worrying that they have missed a rule on the same topic that is in another section of the manual.

Professor Carolyn Williams, like the previous authors Professor Coleen Barger and Dean Darby Dickerson, has had years of experience teaching law students and young associates citation, and she uses her expertise to explain citation in plain English. The Guide streamlined the citation rules into 40 guidelines. In addition to clear explanations, the Guide provides abundant illustrations and examples of proper citation formats for the many types of source materials cited in legal documents. It also has a descriptive table of content, a Fast Formats Locator, and sidebar “tips” along the way. The Guide’s plain language and clear, integrated structure to explaining the legal system of citation for legal materials is easy for students, professors, practitioners, and judges to understand and use.

Yes. If you are a law professor, you can request a free digital copy through Wolters Kluwer's website.

Yes. Appendix 5 and Appendix 2 are online here for free under Student Resources. Appendix 5 takes the guesswork out of abbreviating periodical names. No more having to cull through citation rules to assemble long abbreviations. Instead, just look up the periodical’s name in Appendix 5 and the Guide has your answer.

Appendix 2 is handy when writing documents in an unfamiliar jurisdiction. Users can look up state, federal, native American, or territorial jurisdictions’ local rules of citation for help with public domain formats mandated by some jurisdictions, links to court rules regarding citations, secondary sources specific to that jurisdiction’s citation requirements, and local rules of practice not encoded in any particular rule. The strength of Appendix 2 is that it was vetted by practitioners in each jurisdiction. If you practice in a jurisdiction and think something is missing or wrong in Appendix 2, please reach out to the seventh edition author Carolyn Williams at cvwilliams@email.arizona.edu. The beauty of having Appendix 2 fully online is that updates to the rapidly changing information therein is simpler than if it was in the printed edition.

Previous editions of the Guide had rule correlation guides showing which rules in the Guide corresponded to those in The Bluebook and vice versa. With the seventh edition, however, Appendix 8 makes that redundant. After every sentence in the seventh edition that has a corresponding rule in the 21^st edition of The Bluebook there is an endnote callout to Appendix 8 that gives that citation. Thus, the seventh edition relieves the user from consulting outside sources, simplifying the user experience.

If you are working with older versions of the Guide, the correlation guides can be found here.

Yes. There are two ways to obtain an e-version of the seventh edition. First, when you purchase a hard copy of the seventh edition, the front page has an access code to the Guide on Connected Casebook, Wolters Kluwer’s e-book platform. The e-book has searching, highlighting, and note-taking capabilities; case briefing and outlining tools to support efficient learning; and more. Second, to purchase a digital copy only, go to CasebookConnect.com/catalog.