Rhapsody in Blue: An Ode to The Bluebook was first published in The Green Bag, the only law journal that produces its own set of Supreme Court Bobbleheads. Its author is Michael Coenen, a 2009 Yale Law School grad.

Coenen devotes a stanza to each of The Bluebook‘s 21 rules, a couplet to each of its 16 tables. Even the introductory Bluepages and the terminal index get their due.

As a former editor of the Yale Journal of Law and Technology and author of a Yale Law Journal comment entitled Original Jurisdiction Deadlocks, Coenen surely had enough exposure to The Bluebook to prompt in him a strong reaction to the tome. While it has many detractors (including all 125 members of a Facebok group called The Bluebook is Evil), The Bluebook rarely inspires the kind of affection—nay, devotion—expressed in Coenen’s poem.

What do you think? Do you adore The Bluebook or despise it? And how about the poem: great literature or groaner?

It was like old home week from the moment I checked into the hotel. Even before I had a chance to drop my luggage in my room, I ran into old friends Bob Kraft (@bobkraft), Allison Shields (@allisonshields) and Jim Calloway (@jimcalloway). Throughout the course of the weekend, I also caught up with my roommates, Carolyn Elefant (@carolynelefant) and Nicole Black (@nikiblack), as well as Andy Simpson (no Twitter username for him—he’s a Twitter curmudgeon!), Aviva Cuyler (@avivacuyler), Kevin O’Keefe (@kevinokeefe), Matt Homann (@matthomann), Ed Poll (@LawBiz), Jeff Allen, Gabe Acevedo (@gabeacevedo), Andrea Cannavina (@legaltypist), Larry Port (@rocketmatter), Jack Newton (@goclio) and Gregory Bell (@jazzrochester).

I’m grateful that I got a chance to get to know Adrian Lurssen (@jdtwitt), Ben Schorr (@bschorr), Conrad Saam (@conradsaam), Rodney Dowell (@rodneydowell), David Shulman (@SoFlaEstatePlan), Jordan Furlong (@jordan_law21), Jensen Ware (@jensenware) and Steve Matthews (@stevematthews).

I met and wish I had a chance to spend more time with Amy Derby (@lawfirmblogger—check out her pictures from the show), Nancy Duhon (@nancyduhon), David Masters, Huma Rashid (@huma_rashid), Michelle Rozovics, Richard Maseles, Alan Klevan (@MassLPMAttorney), Erik Mazzone (@erikmazzone), Rex Gradeless (@Rex7), Brandon Prebynski (@prebynski), Ed Scanlan (@edscanlan) Gwynne Monahan (@econwriter5), Rob LaGatta (@RobLaGatta) and Colin O’Keefe (@colinokeefe—the spitting image of his dad, Kevin).

Like many bloggers who attended TechShow, I need a few days to decompress from the conference, catch up with my work, and get my thoughts together for a substantive post about Techshow (and, more specifically, the keynote address by Richard Susskind, author of The End of Lawyers).

In the meantime, here are some videos and pictures from the show:

The Twitter shirt

This cartoon is courtesy of Courtoons, a blog by Ohio appellate lawyer David Mills that features daily cartoons skewering all aspects of the law.

(As a fellow appellate lawyer, I’m also partial to Honest Briefing and A Uniform Normal Person’s System of Citation.)

I was working late last night when Kimberly (a/k/a @nomadtoes) tweeted that she would be driving up to to New York in the morning. Since I’m an unabashed fangirl, I immediately sent off a DM (direct message, for the uninitiated) asking about her plans while in New York.

This morning I woke to an e-mail in which Kimberly told me that she was headed for a location that happens to be ten minutes from where I live, only a few hours hence.

Over lunch a lunch that ended all too quickly, we talked about a wide variety of subjects, from her Alaska cabin to my kids. Although we had never before met in person, it felt like we’ve known each other for years, a powerful demonstration of one of the reasons to be your authentic self online.

Although one of the benefits of contract lawyering is that you can work from even remote locations, and never even have to leave the house if you don’t want to, contract lawyering is far from lonely. The nature of my practice has naturally led me to be a very active online networker, and my networking activities have led to both business relationships and cherished friendships. For me, conferences like the ABA’s TechShow and the National Solo & Small Firm Conference are more about continuing to nuture the friendships that have begun online than about attending CLE sessions or even meeting new people (though I love that aspect of conferences as well).

Talking about Techshow, if you’ll be there (and are also on Twitter), RSVP below.

Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize, archive and distribute cultural works. Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books. The project tries to make these as free as possible, in long-lasting, open formats that can be used on almost any computer.

Project Gutenberg currently has over 27,000 items in its collection, the vast majority of which are in English.

With my busy schedule, I rarely have time to read actual books these days, so Project Gutenberg hasn’t really been at the top of my mind. However, an e-mail I received earlier this week prompted me to re-visit the site, and to share what I learned with you.

It turns out that Project Gutenberg, and its partners and affiliates, offer free e-books that you can read on your cell phone or PDA, as well as on your computer. They even offer audiobooks!

While some of the available works are obscure, many are classics. At the Project Gutenberg site, you can browse by author, title or format. You can also view lists of the top 100 e-books and authors over various periods.

Project Gutenberg affiliate ManyBooks.net offers many of PG’s works in a dizzying array of formats, from JAR (a common Java file format readable on
nearly all mobile handsets) to Plucker (an offline web and free eBook reader for Palm OS® based handheld devices, Windows Mobile (PocketPC) devices and other handheld PDAs) to large print PDF and, yes, even Kindle (assuming, of course, that you were able to get your hands on one before they sold out, or that you’re patient enough to wait 3 months to get one). Check out the Special Collections page for helpful recommendations.

The MobileBooks.org interface isn’t as nice as the one over at ManyBooks.net. Still, with over 20,000 e-books available, the site is nothing to sneeze at.

The Mobile Library offers a very limited selection of well-known titles in JAR formats.

You can download free audiobooks from the Project Gutenberg site, as well as from Librivox.org. LiteralSystems.org offers a very limited selection of audiobooks, but most are popular titles, and the production quality appears to be very high, with dramatic readings and even appropriate background music.

Finally, a new format called PG Mobile will soon be available. According to a Project Gutenberg news release,

PG Mobile is a software that transfers the plain text format provided by Project Gutenberg onto small handset screens—together with all the features known from physical books like turning pages, page numbers and bookmarks. Just download the PG Mobile version of any eBook and read it on your phone: All Project Gutenberg mobile eBooks will soon be available for download as an additional file format in the download section of each Gutenberg title on Gutenberg.org.

With all of these free e-book options, you’ll never be at a loss for reading (or listening) material.

Which free e-books have you downloaded from any of these sites? Which ones do you plan to download in the future?

**Update 12/24/08: A helpful Kindle-owning friend pointed out that, although the Kindle can’t read .txt files, you can convert a .txt file to PDF and then e-mail it to your Kindle. Presto: enough e-books to keep your Kindle busy for a loooong time!**

In the midst of a crisis that may have reached a breaking, point Tuesday afternoon, linguists, and grammarians, everywhere say they are baffled, by the sudden and seemingly random, appearance of commas, in our nation’s sentences. The epidemic of errant punctuation has spread, like wildfire, since signs of the epidemic first, appeared in a Washington Post article, on Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben, Bernanke. “This, is an unsettling trend,” columnist William Sa,fire, told reporters. “We’re seeing a collapse of the grammatical rules that have, held, the English language, together for, centuries.” Experts warn, that if this same, phenomenon, should occur with ellipses…

I get the feeling that it was a slow news day over at The Onion.