Should law review articles have fewer footnotes? That’s one of the issues addressed by Professor Joan Magat in her recent article entitled Bottomheavy: Legal Footnotes, 60 Journal of Legal Educ. 65 (2010).
The author examines what she calls our "big bad habit" of "footnote glut." She suggests that authors of journal articles reduce cites to the utterly necessary ones, thereby reducing the lines of footnote material. She advocates a "rational approach" to footnotes in academic legal writing. This approach, which she calls "liposuction for legal footnotes," would include the following parameters:
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citing to a single source for each fact, observation, or idea that does not originate with the author
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not providing citations for facts, observations, or ideas that can be easily located and verified
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requiring pincites for direct quotes only
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using only one footnote if all the facts and ideas in a single paragraph derive from the same source - no chain of "ids"
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exercising judgment in the use of signals - avoiding the use of "see also" and providing only one source when using "see" or "e.g."
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providing a list of annotated sources at the end of the article for the benefit of the scholar "panning for gold"
For more, read the full article here.
Hat tip to The Legal Skills Prof Blog.
