[14] The authors point out that some of the material in the 1926 first edition of The Bluebook (as well as that in a 1922 Harvard precursor to it published as Instructions for Editorial Work) duplicate material in the 1920 Llewellen booklet and its 1921 successor, a blue pamphlet that the Yale Law Journal published as Abbreviations and Form of Citation.

[15] For several years before the first edition of The Bluebook appeared, Yale, Columbia, and several other law journals "worked out a tentative citation plan", but Harvard initially opposed it "because of skepticism as to the results to be attained and in part because of a desire not to deviate from our forms especially at the solicitation of other Reviews".

"[17] In 1939, the cover of the book was changed from brown to a "more patriotic blue", allegedly to avoid comparison with a color associated with Nazi Germany.

Practitioners use the first in preparing court documents and memoranda, while the second is used primarily in academic settings, such as law reviews and journals.

[22] The latter uses specific formatting to identify types of references, such as the use of small caps for books, newspapers, and law reviews.

[30] This guide focuses on citation for practitioners, so as an example, only two typefaces are used for law reviews, normal and italics.

Judge Richard Posner is "one of the founding fathers of Bluebook abolitionism, having advocated it for almost twenty-five years, ever since his 1986 University of Chicago Law Review article[44] on the subject."

In a 2011 Yale Law Journal article, he wrote: The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation exemplifies hypertrophy in the anthropological sense.

[42] He wrote that a cursory look at the Nineteenth Edition "put [him] in mind of Mr. Kurtz's dying words in Heart of Darkness—'The horror!

Open-source advocates claim that The Bluebook is not protected under copyright because it is a critical piece of legal infrastructure.

[46] Lawyers who represent the Bluebook publishing consortium claim that the "carefully curated examples, explanations and other textual materials" are protected by copyright.

However, a law firm (Ropes & Gray) representing the Harvard Law Review Association (HLRA) sent him a letter stating: [W]e believe that BabyBlue may include content identical or substantially similar to content or other aspects of The Bluebook that constitute original works of authorship protected by copyright, and which are covered by various United States copyright registrations. ...

[48]In response to the HLRA letter to Sprigman, over 150 students, faculty, staff, and alumni of Harvard Law School signed a petition supporting BabyBlue.

[49] A posting in the Harvard Law Record commented: The intellectual property claims that the HLR Association made may or may not be spurious.

But independent of that, the tactics employed by the HLR Association's counsel in dealing with Mr. Malamud and Prof. Sprigman are deplorable.

[49]The posting also suggested that HLRA should "redirect the money it spends on legal fees ($185,664 in 2013)" to a more worthy purpose.

[49] David Post commented: "It's copyright nonsense, and Harvard should be ashamed of itself for loosing its legal hounds to dispense it in order to protect its (apparently fairly lucrative) publication monopoly.

[53] They complained that Harvard was illegally keeping all profits from the first eleven editions, estimated to total $20,000 per year.

They both begin with the same sentence: “This pamphlet does not pretend to include a complete list of abbreviations or all the necessary data as to form.” The subtitle of the Bluebook is “Abbreviations and Form of Citation.” The Jones v. Smith Connecticut citation that is the basic case citation example used by the Yale precursors back to Llewellyn-Field is the basic case example used in Bluebook 1.