"A grim capitalist logic thus drives the malignant growth of The Bluebook:" Posner has the Bluebook Blues Again

Anyone who has been around awhile knows that Posner has an opinion on just about everything. And why the hell not. He's a brainiac and what he has to say is usually worth the time it takes to read (and understand). He is after all, the founder of the law and economic movement, the only branch of legal scholarship that has had any substantial impact in the real world during the last 30-some years.

Much law blogging fodder has been generated recently because Judge Posner doesn't like the Bluebook. In the Yale Law Review, he writes

The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation exemplifies hypertrophy in the anthropological sense. It is a monstrous growth, remote from the functional need for legal citation forms, that serves obscure needs of the legal culture and its student subculture.

OK, so I had to turn to a dictionary to find out what "hypertrophy in the anthropological sense" meant but I've grown accustomed to keeping a dictionary within arm's reach whenever I "read Posner." He adds

I have put my money where my mouth is, metaphorically speaking. I don’t use The Bluebook or any other form book in either my judicial opinions or my academic writings. Journals, and not only law journals, do sometimes impose citation forms on me. But the Federal Reporter does not; nor do the publishers of most of my books. My judicial and academic writings receive their share of criticism, but no one to my knowledge has criticized them for citation form. The reason is that readers are not interested in citation form. Unless the form is outlandish, it is invisible.

So "no one to my knowledge has criticized them for citation form." Well, here's one criticism. No where does this scholar in law and economics makes the argument for vendor-neutral citation formatting. So much for "grim capitalist logic." [JH]