edwinhu Bluebook Footnote Audit Workflow
Systematic Bluebook 21st edition compliance audit for law review manuscripts in DOCX format.
Announce: "Using bluebook-audit to run a systematic Bluebook compliance check."
Overview
Seven-phase linear workflow: Extract -> Check -> Report -> Correct -> Verify -> Archive -> Cross-Refs
/bluebook-audit -> extract -> check -> report -> [USER REVIEWS] -> correct -> verify -> archive -> crossrefs
/bluebook-audit-fix -> diagnose -> route to {re-check, re-correct, re-verify}
Phase Summary
| Phase | Responsibility | Gate |
|---|---|---|
| Extract | Parse DOCX -> structured JSON with formatting | footnotes_data.json exists, all FNs extracted |
| Check | Mechanical checks → Gemini Batch per-footnote → Claude cross-footnote review | audit_findings.json exists, ALL FNs covered, three-layer merge complete |
| Report | Present findings to user for review | AUDIT_REPORT.md exists, user acknowledges |
| Correct | Apply fixes to DOCX via lxml | Corrected DOCX exists, fix counts match |
| Verify | Re-scan to confirm fixes applied | Zero remaining issues in re-scan |
| Archive | perma.cc URL archiving | All URLs archived, links written to DOCX |
| Cross-Refs | Convert supra/infra notes to NOTEREF fields | All cross-refs are auto-updating fields |
How to Start
- User provides a DOCX file path
- Workflow creates
scratch/directory for intermediate artifacts - Proceeds through phases sequentially
Next Step
Read the entry command:
Read("commands/bluebook-audit.md") # relative to this skill's base directory
Every footnote in the document must be audited. No subsets. No sampling.
Auditing only "major-severity" footnotes or a random sample guarantees missed errors. The formatted Gemini audit must cover ALL footnotes, not just previously flagged ones.
Skipping footnotes is NOT HELPFUL — missed errors go to publication and embarrass the user.
NEVER send plain text to Gemini for typeface auditing. Always include formatting markup.
Plain text produces 10-20x false positives because Gemini cannot see what is already italic/small caps/roman. Inline markup (*italic*, [SC]small caps[/SC]) reduces false positives from ~400 to ~20 for a 239-footnote document.
After applying corrections, ALWAYS re-run the scanner to verify fixes were applied.
NBSP characters, run boundaries, and cross-run text cause silent failures. A fix that "applied" in code may not have actually changed the DOCX. Re-scanning is mandatory.
Never drop a mechanical finding because Gemini didn't flag it.
Deterministic checks (signal italic, terminal periods, Id. chains) are 100% reliable. Gemini misses ~30% of signal formatting issues because it focuses on citation-level analysis and lacks a dedicated signal-checking output field. During merge/dedup, mechanical findings are authoritative for their rule categories. Gemini adds value only for judgment calls (source type classification, abbreviation tables).
Previous failure: Gemini reported FN103 as having only typeface issues on article titles, completely missing that "See also" was not italicized — which the mechanical checker caught.
Gemini consistently misclassifies non-standard source types. Never auto-fix Gemini's typeface suggestions for SEC releases, executive orders, working papers, or regulatory materials.
The hardest part of a Bluebook audit is determining the correct typeface for non-standard sources. Gemini defaults to "everything should be italic or small caps" but many source types are correctly roman:
- SEC releases/rules/concept releases → roman (regulatory material, Rule 14.6)
- Executive order titles → roman (Rule 14.7)
- Working paper series designations → roman (parenthetical)
- Company names in no-action letters → roman
The audit report MUST separate "verified fixes" (clear violations) from "judgment calls" (source type dependent) and include a "correct as-is" section documenting why Gemini's suggestions were rejected. See references/audit-patterns.md for the full source type reference table.
Previous failure: Gemini flagged 10+ items as needing italic/small caps that were actually correct as roman (SEC releases, exec orders, working paper designations). Without the source type reference table, these would have been incorrectly "fixed."
- Gemini hallucinates citation formats and fabricates citation details. Its output is a lead sheet, not a verdict — run the mechanical checker independently, merge results, and spot-check before applying anything. A Gemini suggestion applied unverified is an unverified claim applied as a fix.
- Fixes cascade: a correction in one phase creates new errors in dependent phases, and every phase catches a different error type. Re-run the affected scanner after every correction pass — "earlier phases were clean" says nothing about errors the fixes just introduced.
- A hardcoded journal list and a previously-extracted
sources.bibare both LAGGING records, and each one hid real errors in the same document:J. Corp. L.was not inJOURNAL_NAMES, and 19 of 53 article cites were missing from a bib extracted four months earlier. Validating a manuscript against either has the dependency backwards — it hides precisely the citations most recently reworked, which are the ones most likely to be wrong. Runbib_gaps.pyBEFORE the small-caps check so the bib is current when the check reads it. - The bib's
journalfield only exists on@articleentries, so it covers article periodicals and nothing else — 23 of one document's 54 small-capped names were newspapers, magazines, blogs and BOOK titles, which live in@misc/@book. Treating "scan the bib" as complete coverage silently exempts every book and newspaper in the manuscript. - One wrong supra reference invalidates the reader's trust in ALL footnotes. Sampling, eyeballing, or marking a footnote correct without checking the reporter/volume audits a subset and asserts compliance for the whole — a claim the audit never verified. Every footnote, every phase, regardless of document length.
If you sent plain text to Gemini instead of formatted text with footnote markers, DELETE the results and START OVER with properly formatted input. Gemini cannot audit what it cannot parse.