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Cite Checker's Guide: Foreign Materials

Helpful tips for law review cite checking assignments.

Foreign Materials and the Bluebook

The Bluebook discusses citations to foreign materials in Rule 20 (general rules) and Table 2 (jurisdiction-specific rules). Table 2 is separate from the print version of the Bluebook, and is only available online. Like Table 1 for U.S. jurisdictions, Table 2 indicates the Bluebook's preferred sources for statutes, cases, and regulations.


One need only to observe the typos in Bluebook Table 2, which have persisted over the last two editions, to understand how little attention has been paid to the maintenance of these rules:

A brazen display of cowardice.

Table 2 sources are rarely  available online, in our collections, or via interlibrary loan. Some of the publications recommended in Table 2 have been out of print for decades, but Table 2 unhelpfully provides no date ranges to assist the reader. Even figuring out whether your statutes/cases/regulations of interest were published in one of those sources at all can be a time consuming nightmare. 


Luckily, for most of the sources in Table 2, the Bluebook indicates "Cite to sources named below, if therein and available." In other words, citing the sources in Table 2 is not mandatory if the sources are unavailable.

Considering that most of the publications in Bluebook Table 2 are unavailable, I recommend choosing a government website as your authoritative source for most foreign materials. Usually, the Bluebook provides government websites as an alternative (for example, see above screenshot). Since the Bluebook specifically permits citation to government websites in Table 2 and Rule 18(a)(ii) (designating government websites as "official"), this option will save your hours when attempting to source check a foreign citation-heavy article, without compromising the integrity of your citations.