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Disclose, Don’t Cite AI: Why You Should Ignore Bluebook Rule 18.3
When the Bluebook released its 22nd edition with the new Rule 18.3 on AI-generated content, my immediate reaction — shared with colleagues across the country — was simple: “This is bonkers.”
The Bluebook has always been a student-edited publication, but for prior editions, the law student editors would reach out to legal citation experts for feedback on drafts before publication. As far as I know, this didn’t happen with the 22nd edition — at least, they didn’t consult the people who have traditionally been involved in these discussions. The result is a rule that fundamentally misunderstands how large language models work, conflates documentation with citation, and creates burdensome requirements that miss the point of why we cite sources in the first place.
While Rule 18.3 appears in the academic section rather than the practitioners’ pages, practitioners often must follow academic citation formats for law review articles, briefs in certain courts, and other scholarly contexts — making this everyone’s problem. Yet buried within this technical confusion lies one genuinely useful insight that deserves rescue from the wreckage.
The Rule and Its Reception
Rule 18.3 appears on page 191 of the Bluebook and requires that “authors citing outputs from generative…
