The Bluebook is a Harsh Mistress

Now, from the Footnotes-Only-an-Editor-Could-Love Department, comes this. 

It's footnote 11 from Bell and Parchomovsky's great new property piece.  And it reads, in its entirety:

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See id.  (

To perhaps a greater extent than even the legal scholars, modern economists assume that property consists of an ad hoc collection of rights in resources. Indeed, there is a tendency among economists to use the term property ‘to describe virtually every device—public or private, common-law or regulatory, contractual or governmental, formal or informal—by which divergences between private and social costs or benefits are reduced.

(citations omitted)).

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Yes, the entire paren is a blockquote.  The open and close parenthesis are not block-quoted, however, and neither is the (citation omitted).  The result looks pretty silly.  (The length of the quoted text, by the way, is 66 words, or 17 past the limit of 49 which normally triggers block-quotes.)

Now I understand the need for uniformity.  But this case strikes me as a prime example of a case when an exception to the rule makes more sense than strict adherence.  And I must say, I think that the footnote would look much better as:

See id.  ("To perhaps a greater extent than even the legal scholars, modern economists assume that property consists of an ad hoc collection of rights in resources. Indeed, there is a tendency among economists to use the term property ‘to describe virtually every device—public or private, common-law or regulatory, contractual or governmental, formal or informal—by which divergences between private and social costs or benefits are reduced." (citations omitted)).