D'Angelo Law Library Blog

Solving the Legal Abbreviations Puzzle

It's difficult to decypher legal abbreviations sometimes, and especially when doing research on historical, foreign, comparative, and international law topics.  For unknown legal abbreviations, you can use Black's Law Dictionary (online on Westlaw) and Prince's Bieber Dictionary of Legal Abbreviations.  But here's a handy free resource that helps with many legal abbreviations you'll encounter - the Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations.

For example, if you found a citation to Shelley's Case - 1 Co. Rep. 93b, 76 Eng. Rep. 206 (1581) - you'll see in the Cardiff Index that the abbreviations stand for "Coke's King's Bench Reports" and "English Reports".  The reports of Sir Edward Coke are in Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) and Early English Books Online (EEBO).  The English Reports are in HeinOnline, LLMC Digital Law Library, and CommonLII (free).

New 19th Edition of The Bluebook Published

    A new 19th edition of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation was published in summer 2010.  Compiled by the editors of the Columbia, Harvard, and University of Pennsylvania Law Reviews and the Yale Law Journal, the newest edition offers changes in format along with significant updates to the citation approach for electronic resources.  All of the blue pages in the back of the book have been revised and now published into four tables for easy reference to primary law. Copies of the new edition are available at the D'Angelo Law  Library,see http://lens.lib.uchicago.edu/?itemid=|library/marc/uc|1504090. Information on the 19th edition of the Bluebook, including changes and updates, is available at  http://www.legalbluebook.com/Public/Introduction.aspx