Because when you look deep into the issue (vs the emotional response) you see there is a lot of merit in having a sophisticated citation system (for now). Why? There are 9,998 court jurisdictions in the US. Plus all the international, federal, state, and local ... https://twitter.com/ElevateLamb/status/1304771837507899395

non-court jurisdictions. Getting them all on one, simple system would be great-and in our current environment nearly impossible. So, we need some system to handle all the citation issues.

Is the Bluebook good? No, absolutely not. But it is what we have and in the age of ...

digitization, some level of consistency is better than none. Even those who claimed to ignore it (Posner) actually followed it fairly closely. Plus, it has existed for a long time so parsing old materials requires understanding the system. And, when you look to systems ...

outside law (for example, federal bibliography standards) there are many parallels and overlaps.

So, yes, we could do some simplifying of the Bluebook and still achieve those objectives and yes, more consistency would be nice. But, until those 9,998 court ...

jurisdictions and at least that many other jurisdictions all agree to play nice and get on one common, simple system, we will live in a world of some complexity. Being able to automate it as much as possible would be a boon, and something already done in areas outside law.