Lucerna Juris

Lantern of the Law – Illuminating the Interstices

About

I’m Luke. I’m a lawyer. “Lucerna Juris” was the nickname of Irnerius of Bologna. Irnerius was the first glossator (i.e., a commentator citing another legal corpus) who glossed Roman law at the Università di Bologna in the twelfth century.

Portrait of Irnerius of Bologna, the twelfth-century glossator.
Irnerius of Bologna – “LUCERNA JURIS” (The Lantern of the Law).

In 2023, I visited the Jurisprudence Faculty at the Università di Bologna. I was The Bluebook Editor for the Columbia Law Review. Along with our sister journals, my fellow CLR editors and I were preparing to publish the Twenty-Second Edition of The Bluebook. My fellow CLR editors and I were responsible for rewriting the entirety of Rule 18 (the citation rule governing technology) and for making The Bluebook more international. (This meant calling law faculty in Singapore and Lagos from airport lobbies or NYC buses.)

When I saw the street number for the Jurisprudence Faculty of the University of Bologna’s Law School, the school where Irnerius taught, I felt “an echo of the infinite….”1 In the smallest way, my fellow editors and I carried on Irnerius’s mission nearly a millennium later.

The author standing beside the street number of the University of Bologna’s Jurisprudence Faculty.
Pictured: Dork Grinning at Coincidental Number, Signifying Nothing. Photograph by Lauren Cronin.

“LUCERNA JURIS” hopes to be a lantern of the law where the law is opaque. This blog will alight upon legal developments, cases, circuit splits, ordinances, etc., warranting illumination and elucidation.

Any and all are welcome to write.

Email: lpcronin@protonmail.com

  1. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Path of the Law, 10 Harv. L. Rev. 457, 478 (1897). ↩︎