Role of Law Review in Legal Education, The
![handle is hein.journals/jled31 and id is 221 raw text is: COMMENTS
THE ROLE OF LAW REVIEW IN LEGAL EDUCATION
BARBARA H. CANE *
While law reviews find an audience among students, legal scholars and
an occasional practitioner, it is generally conceded that the law review is a
species of publication which exists primarily to be written, not to be read.2
This is borne out by the fact that of more than one hundred and eighty
law reviews published each year, only one, the Harvard Law Review, is
self-supporting. The rest, even those with a topical focus calculated to
attract national interest, could not survive without financial support to
supplement subscriptions from alumni and law libraries. An uncharitable
critic pointed out two reasons for the scanty readership of the average law
review: One is its style. The other is its content. I
There are a number of articles which assess the written product of the
reviews.4 In this paper I will examine how the institution came into being,
how a law review actually functions, and the consequences of the domi-
nant law review pattern for legal education and the profession.'
Origins of the Law Review
The University of Pennsylvania published the first law review in the
country, but the first law review to truly flourish was the one put out by
Harvard in the academic year 1886-87. The editors were quick to realize
that the Law Review could be more than just a school magazine. Their
expressed object was to
'The writer is a third-year evening student at Suffolk Law School who terminated her
connection with law review after about two months. See generally Douglas, Law Reviews and
Full Disclosure, 40 Wash.L.Rev. 227, 230 (1965). (Authors should disclose relationship to
subject matter in footnote No. 1 in order to elevate them from people with hidden axes to
grind to proper members of the fourth Estate of the law).
2 Havinghurst, Law Reviews and Legal Education, 51 N.W.L.Rev. 22, 24 (1956).
Rodell, Goodbye to Law Reviews, 23 Va.L.Rev. 38 (1936). Unregenerate, Rodeil wrote
26 years later, here we go again. Not but there is anything new or nastier to say about
these citadels of pseudo-scholarship, those squanderers of numberless square miles of tim-
berland . . . the law reviews. A quarter century has brought no revolution among the
professional purveyors of pretentious poppycock even though hot war and cold war and split
atoms and space ships have rocked the earth. 48 Va.L.Rev. 279, 287 (1967).
4 E. g., Noteboom & Walker, The Law Review-Is it Meeting the Needs of the Community?,
44 Denver L.J. 426 (1966); Mewett, Reviewing the Law Reviews, 8 J.Legal Educ. 188 (1956);
See Djonovich, Legal Education, A Selected Bibliography, 146-149 (1970) (useful Bibliography
of articles about law review).
I am indebted to the many students at Suffolk Law School, Boston College Law School
and the Harvard Law School who were generous with their time and their observations, and
to the faculty members and administrators at Suffolk Law School who helped me explore this
topic. Because of the confidential nature of some of the conversations I have decided not to
footnote specific interviews but attribute them to a student, an editor or whatever is
appropriate. The interviews were conducted between October 1978 and January 1979.
1981]](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/jled31&div=22&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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