Yeager on Discursive Footnotes

Daniel B. Yeager, California Western School of Law, has published Discursive Footnotes. Here is the abstract.

This essay offers a comprehensive account of the past forty years of scholarship on footnotes within law. Not just any old footnotes, but footnotes that are discursive in form, that is, those with an expressive rather than bibliographic function. After contrasting the function of discursive footnotes in judicial opinions with those in academic legal literature, this essay identifies and decodes a comparatively hidden avant garde footnotes literature. Borrowing from techniques of literary criticism, that literature, properly understood, provides a foundation for our making more subtle judgments about both the relation of primary to secondary texts and the allocation of responsibilities between readers and writers.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.