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44 U. Miami L. Rev. 1009 (1989-1990)
Footnote Skulduggery and Other Bad Habits

handle is hein.journals/umialr44 and id is 1021 raw text is: Footnote* Skulduggery** and
Other Bad Habits***
ARTHUR AUSTIN****
The question gets even thornier when we consider how... a
law review article is formulated. There is typically a page of foot-
notes for each page of text. The author may not assert so much as
The sun rises in the east without citing Copernicus.'
I.  INTRODUCTION .........................................................  1010
II. THE FOOTNOTE AND THE CHALLENGE OF NEW MOTIVATIONS ............ 1012
III. CAUSES OF NEW CITATION MOTIVATIONS .............................. 1014
A. Evolution in Law Journals Creates Pressure for More, More, More ...... 1014
B. Publish or Perish Motivates Footnote Differentiation ................... 1015
IV. THE OPIATE OF THE MASSES: DENSITY AND THE NUMBERS GAME ........ 1016
V.  THE  TITILLATING  NOm   ..............................................  1018
VI.  NON-VERIFIABLE  NOTES ...............................................  1020
A.  Conversation  Cites  .................. ............................  1020
B.  The  Author's  Note ................................................  1021
VII.  THE  IDEOLOGICAL  NOTE  .............................................  1024
VIII.  SELF-CITATION ......................................................... 1026
IX. THE TECHNICAL JARGON DILEMMA ................................... 1028
X.  CONCLUSION  .........................................................  1029
* Footnotes are, therefore, a common thing to thousands of people but who among
those thousands can say when they began?
I have not been able to discover their origin. Articles have been written to both
condemn and defend them, but none, that I can find, to trace their origin. They
therefore seem to be the mark of a scholar but not the object of his study.
Barr, The Origin of Footnotes, 5 RQ 16, 16 (1966).
   Over the-years the footnote has regularly provided a safe refuge for untenable
hypotheses. Writers are inclined to behave as if they will be held less accountable for
indiscretions committed below the text than in it.... Lunacy in small print is lunacy
nonetheless, and it is particularly reprehensible when it is not even amusing.
Bowersock, The Art of the Footnote, 53 AM. SCHOLAR 54, 61 (1983/84).
*    Since the use to which the notes will be put by the reader is practical-to assess
or verify'an assertion in the source or to seek more information from it-footnotes
shoald never be used as ornamentation or ballast for your text. The quality and
extent of your scholarship are not measured by the number of notes or by their
elaborateness.
J. BARZUN & H. GRAFF, THE MODERN RESEARCHER 361 (4th ed. 1985).
**** Edgar A. Hahn Professor of Jurisprudence, Case Western Reserve University School
of Law, Cleveland, Ohio.
1. Coleman, Dilemmas, STUDENT LAW., Feb. 1989, at 13.

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