Law Reviews: Good or Bad?

Adam Liptak, the Supreme Court correspondent of The New York Times, has written a new article titled “Law Scholarship’s Lackluster Reviews” in today’s New York Times [here].  This article asks why law reviews are edited by law students and why they exist in the first place.  The author is against the use of law student editors and seems doubtful on law reviews themselves.

This sentiment is not new and pokes its head up from time to time in the legal community.  As Mr. Liptak points out, even a law professor from Yale in 1936 was against law reviews.

For those interested in some more detail on this controversy in legal scholarship, we have detailed a short list of law review articles related to this topic:

1. Do Law Reviews Need Reform?  A Survey of Law Professors, Student Editors, Attorneys, and Judges, 59 Loy. L. Rev. 1.
2. Law Review Scholarship in the Eyes of the Twenty-First Century Supreme Court Justices:  An Empirical Analysis, 4 Drexel L. Rev. 399.
3. The Law Review is Dead:  Long Live the Law Review: A Closer Look at the Declining Judicial Citation of Legal Scholarship, 45 Wake Forest L. Rev. 1185.
4. The Value of Law Review Membership, 71 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1721.
5. The History and Influence of the Law Review Institution, 30 Akron L. Rev. 15.

If you are interested in seeing how courts have treated a specific law review article you can always take a look at the Shepard’s(Lexis) or KeyCite (Westlaw) report for the article.