No, this isn’t a post about the Canadian blog and magazine Precedent: The new rules of law and style. Instead – following on from my posts about OSCOLA (here), the infamous Bluebook (here), minimalist styles for online journals (here), and an emerging Kiwi style (here) – this is a rather belated comment on a post by Simon Fodden on Slaw:

University of Chicago Manual of Legal Citation Online

The newest version of the University of Chicago Manual of Legal Citation, known as the Maroonbook, is available online in PDF. This brief — 77 page — competitor to the Bluebook is not directly applicable to us here in Canada, of course, but may assist with material filed in the United States. And it serves to remind us that we, too, ought to have available to us a free, online manual.

We’ve mooted this on Slaw a number of times, and, if some irons I’ve got in the fire at the moment get hot in the next few weeks, I’ll have more to say on a possible Slaw project to create such a manual.

Of interest, perhaps, is the fact that the Maroonbook advises us to “[o]mit periods and apostrophes whenever possible.” Slawyer Gary P. Rodrigues addressed the pesky point in The full stop in legal citation – has its time finally come?

There are two interesting nuggets of information here. First, the second edition of legal version of the Chicago Manual of Style is now fully available online. And second, there may soon be a Slaw project to create a similar manual for Canada. Is this a development too far. There are already many many style-sheets out there (some are even Canadian) – do we really need another one? Properly house-styled answers on a post-card please …