ALWD Citation Manual

The ALWD Citation Manual is a legal citation system for the United States compiled by the Association of Legal Writing Directors. Its first edition was published in 2000. Currently, it is in its fifth edition (2014).

It primarily competes with the Bluebook style, a system developed by the law reviews at Harvard, Yale, The University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia. Citations in the two formats are roughly similar. However, ALWD differs from Bluebook in one key respect.

Under the Bluebook system, the type styles used in citations found in academic legal articles (always footnoted) are very different from those used in citations within court documents (always cited inline). While the ALWD system follows the standard convention of footnotes within academic articles and inline citations in court documents, it rejects Bluebook's insistence on using different type styles in the two classes of documents. The ALWD type style is identical to that used in the Bluebook system for citations within court documents.

Four U.S. jurisdictions have adopted ALWD:

In addition to that, 72 law schools and 47 paralegal schools have fully adopted ALWD. Law journals such as Animal Law, NAELA, and Legal Writing have also adopted ALWD.

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