To a reader's lament—are footnotes necessary?—one response might be: ‘As for the footnotes, I have preferred to be simply informative, with a strong feeling that if one carried footnotes to the extreme one could end up writing a history of all civilisation’. Leon Edel, ‘Introduction’ in Henry James: Letters (vol 1: 1843–1875) (1974) xxxv. For other responses see, for example, G W Bowersock, ‘The Art of the Footnote’ (1984) 53 American Scholar 54; Abner Mikva, ‘Goodbye to Footnotes’ (1985) 56 Colorado Law Review 647; Arthur Austin, ‘Footnotes as Product Differentiation’ (1987) 40 Vanderbilt Law Review 1131; Arthur Austin, ‘Footnote Skulduggery and Other Bad Habits’ (1990) 44 University of Miami Law Review 1009; Arthur Austin, ‘Political Correctness is a Footnote’ (1992) 17 Oregon Law Review 543; Jack Balkin, ‘The Footnote’ (1989) 83 Northwestern University Law Review 275; Herma Kay, ‘In Defense of Footnotes’ (1990) 32 Arizona Law Review 419; Edward Becker, ‘In Praise of Footnotes’ (1996) 74 Washington University Law Review 1; Liz Fisher, ‘Some Notes on Footnotes’ (1997) 71 Australian Law Journal 245; Robert James, ‘Are Footnotes in Opinions Given Full Precedential Effect?’ (1999) 2 The Green Bag (2^nd Series) 267; Anthony Grafton, The Footnote (1997); Stephen Feldman, ‘An Arrow to the Heart: The Love and Death of Postmodern Scholarship’ (2001) 54 Vanderbilt Law Review 2351 (suggesting that Dennis Arrow, ‘Pomobabble Newspeak and Constitutional “Meaning” for the Uninitiated’ (1997) 97 Michigan Law Review 461, by its ‘text … not even begin[ning] until the third page of the article and a total of only six lines of text appear[ing] within the first ten pages … because the epigraphs and the initial footnotes are so exhaustingly long’ and by ‘many, if not most, of the pages in [Arrow's] article there [being] no text, only footnotes’, reverses the normal hegemonic priority of ‘the text being privileged over the footnotes’ and, therefore, perhaps, also indicates that ‘the text itself is … empty of content’). On perhaps the most famous constitutional law footnote see Louis Lusky, Our Nine Tribunes: The Supreme Court in Modern America (1993) 119–32, 177–90 (explanation and drafts of footnote 4 in United States v Carolene Products Corp. (1938) 304 US 144, 152–3 n 4); Louis Lusky, ‘Footnote Redux: A Carolene Products Reminiscence’ (1982) 82 Columbia Law Review 1093. For an almost equally famous footnote see Sanjay Mody, ‘Brown Footnote Eleven in Historical Context: Social Science and the [United States] Supreme Court's Quest for Legitimacy’ (2002) 54 Stanford Law Review 793 (discussing Brown v Board of Education (1954) 347 US 483–95 n 11 and noting that footnote 11 has been characterised as ‘the most dispute–laden footnote in American constitutional law’).

The Founding Father? Edmund Barton and the Australian Constitution: Geoffrey Bolton,Edmund Barton (Allen & Unwin,2000)

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