My article on Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum is up on SSRN. It is forthcoming in the Notre Dame Law Review‘s Federal Courts Issue. Here is the abstract; comments on the article are welcome: The unanimous ruling in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum blind-sided the legal academy. The case involved one of the most contentious […]
Archive | Law Reviews
The Relevance and Readership of Student-Edited Law Reviews: Another Response to Liptak
Like Will Baude below, I was underwhelmed by Adam Liptak’s essay in the New York Times on the longstanding criticisms of law reviews. To add a few more problems with Liptak’s essay: (1) Liptak suggests that the readership of law reviews has dropped and will continue to drop. I don’t see this. Sure, the circulation […]
In Defense of Law Reviews
Adam Liptak has a piece in the New York Times recounting many claims that law review articles are on average very bad, and useless to the bench and bar: Law reviews are such a target-rich environment for ridicule that it is barely sporting to make fun of them. … About 43 percent of law review […]
Do Law Review Word Limits Matter?
Professor Bainbridge investigates, and finds that neither the Yale Law Journal nor the Harvard Law Review appears to observe their stated preference for shorter articles.
Shameless Plug: Law Review Edition
Pepperdine’s Derek Muller considers the purpose of law reviews and asks: “Why aren’t more journals like the Case Western Reserve Law Review?” Among other things, Professor Muller notes the law review’s e-reader friendly formatting and typeface, podcast series, and substantive Twitter feed. I’d also note that articles are promptly published online in PDF and that the […]
Thanks in Authors’ Footnotes
Law review article authors routinely thank lots of people in their thank-you notes (generally the introductory footnote that also mentions the author’s affiliation, e-mail address, and the like). I’ve often heard the argument that authors try to use these thank-you’s to impress readers, and especially law review editors: Citing lots of Big Guns in the […]
What Should You Do When Someone Incorrectly Cites Your Academic Work?
At CoOp, Lawrence Cunningham ponders how academics should respond when someone else incorrectly cites their work. Wonderful as it is to be cited, being cited incorrectly poses a dilemma. If your article is referenced for a proposition it does not support, what should you do? Should you alert the author of the piece or the […]
Harvard Human Rights Journal Editor “a Little Concerned” About a Prospective Author’s Having Clerked for a Conservative Supreme Court Justice
David Lat (Above the Law) reports on an interesting e-mail exchange among the editors of the Harvard Human Rights Journal (which, like the great majority of law reviews, is edited by law students); I quote a long excerpt below. Here’s my take: It’s almost inevitable that an editor’s judgment of the quality of a law […]
Reminder to Law Review Editors About Rearranging Citations and Parentheticals
I’ve seen people err on this so often that I thought it was worth noting: If you’re rearranging citations in a footnote (usually to follow the Bluebook citation order recommendations), make sure you look closely at the parentheticals. Some parentheticals in a long citation refer back to earlier parentheticals, using phrases such as “(same)” or […]
Richard Posner on the Bluebook
Almost five years ago, I wrote a post arguing for the abolition of the Bluebook, the standard system of legal citation used by most law journals. As I argued there and in several subsequent posts (e.g. here), I think the Bluebook is vastly more complicated than it should be, and creates an enormous waste of […]
Because We Thought The Errors In Your Article Were Cass Sunstein’s Fault
It is common in the author footnote of law review articles — you know, the footnote that follows the author’s name that tells you who the author is — to thank people who have read drafts of the articles and offered comments to help improve it. It is also common to follow that expression of […]
Measuring the Accuracy of Law Review Placements
Law professor blogs love to debate the law review submission process, and in particular the pros and cons of student-edited journals. The most common complaints about the current system are that placements reflect author/school prestige and students just aren’t informed enough to separate better articles from worse ones. Over at Prawfs, Fabio Arcila comments: “There […]