All footnotes!

By Manuel Ogando, while preparing the Portuguese translation of LFFS

My new book, Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023), is festooned with footnotes. One reason for this is I’m used to the style and requirements of law reviews and law journals. Every scholarly discipline has its citation format. I, for one, despise in-line citations [such as: (Block 2017a) ], and I also despise endnotes. I hate flipping back and forth to the end of the chapter or book, as I usually read footnotes or glance at them. I prefer a modified version of Chicago-style, and in footnote form, although, again, many people hate footnotes, as I noted previously:

I’ve always liked the following comments by Bryan Garner, in The Elements of Legal Style (page 93). Garner notes that although footnotes can usefully refer you to other references, “you can hardly ignore, at the foot of every page, the notes that ‘run along, like little angry dogs barking at the text.’ These days, the notes are more likely Great Danes than chihuahuas.” ¹

I don’t view them as annoying barking dogs; what is annoying are endnotes. In any case, my new book is littered with them. Some may hate them, but not everyone, apparently. From one reader:

In case you had any concerns about all the footnotes and Appendices, I for one am a fan. I read each one that has supplemental commentary. LFFS trivia: the first page of Part 1 has no footnotes. It’s not till page 79 we find another page absent footnotes. Love the meat on the bone!

Update: in my recent article The Problem with Intellectual Property, I have an extensive bibliography including over 80 references to my own writing—books, chapters, articles, blog posts. Now it is common to have multiple citations from the same year, e.g, Kinsella 2023a, 2023b, etc. But on occasion a reference is denoted by the full date, such as a blogpost. So you would think it’s more rare to have two references on the very same day that need the a, b treatment but I have a couple there: (April 23, 2025a) and (April 23, 2025b).

Related: Blog Posts as Footnotes–Webnotes

Update (Nov. 4, 2026): The Journal of Libertarian Studies has issued a call for papers for a special issue, edited by Per Bylund, called “Whither Libertarianism?” Submissions must “follow The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th ed.” But which Chicago? Chicago has two systems, and recent JLS articles use author-date—in-line citations, the very style I despise. ² JLS does allow footnotes, but only for side comments; the sources themselves still get cited in-line.

For those confused by the alphabet soup of citation styles, here are the main ones, with my own work as the guinea pig:

• Chicago notes-bibliography (humanities: history, philosophy, the arts). Footnotes or endnotes, plus a bibliography. Note form: Stephan Kinsella, Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston: Papinian Press, 2023), 32. This is the one I use—modified, and always as footnotes.
• Chicago author-date (social sciences, economics—and JLS). In-line: (Kinsella 2023, 32), keyed to a References list at the end: Kinsella, Stephan. 2023. Legal Foundations of a Free Society. Houston, Tex.: Papinian Press.
• Bluebook (U.S. law reviews and courts—what people mean by “law review style”). Footnotes, signals like See and Cf., and volume–journal–page form: Stephan Kinsella, Against Intellectual Property, 15 J. Libertarian Stud. 1 (2001).
• Maroon Book (The University of Chicago Manual of Legal Citation, used by the University of Chicago Law Review and a few others). A stripped-down Bluebook that trusts the writer’s judgment over hundreds of rules, and drops the periods from abbreviations: 15 J Libertarian Stud 1 (2001).
• ALWD Guide to Legal Citation (legal-writing courses). Started as a saner alternative to the Bluebook; now nearly identical to it.
• APA (psychology, education). In-line: (Kinsella, 2023, p. 32), with reference-list titles in sentence case.
• MLA (literature, languages). In-line author-page: (Kinsella 32), with a Works Cited list.
• Harvard (generic author-date, common in the UK and Australia). A close cousin of Chicago author-date.
• OSCOLA (UK law). Footnotes; roughly the British Bluebook.

My preference hasn’t changed: modified Chicago, in footnotes. Author-date makes the reader decode strings like “(Hoppe 2002, 2001, 1998; Rockwell 2015)” mid-sentence, then flip to the back to learn what “Kinsella 2005b” is—the same flipping that makes endnotes so annoying.

1. Quoting S.M. Crothers, “That History Should Be Readable,” in The Gentle Reader 172 (1903; repr. 1972). To Footnote or Not To Footnote. [↩]
2. See, e.g., Christos Armoutidis, “Who Owns Public Property? Libertarian Property Theory and the Problem of Immigration,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 29 (2025): 56–71, which cites me as “Kinsella (2023, 32).” [↩]