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36 J. Legal Educ. 18 (1986)
Endangered Species, An

handle is hein.journals/jled36 and id is 28 raw text is: An Endangered Species? John Henry Schlegel I can see it now. Bumper stickers emblazoned with SAVE THE AMERICAN LAW REVIEW And then, of course, there will be fancy ties with little White Books embroidered on them and belts and maybe even A-line skirts and lime green sport pants. But before we rush to petition the Department of the Interior, I think that one ought to consider Roger Cramton's argument quite closely for two pieces of it strike me as utterly implausible. The idea that law review training is a good education for the students who receive it is a quite ancient justification of the enterprise. Roger may be the first to explicitly point out the way that this scheme delivered special benefits to those least in need of them, though I am surprised that he has not noted the moral outrageousness of such a distribution of entitlements. I would be more worried about this lapse if I thought that the argument could hold water. But the notion that law review was and is designed as a special educational experience is preposterous.. The point of law review from the beginning has been to separate the best from the merely good for the benefit of fancy employers-first corporate, then corporate and judicial. Employers liked this separation because it lowered their costs first by limiting the number of students who might plausibly have merited an interview and second by teaching each student something useful for his new job-how to endure intense boredom for the corporate types, how to write a judicial opinion for the aspiring clerks. But neither of these skills is educational. The ability to endure intense boredom is quite antieducational, given the limited but positive role of consumer unrest in improving faculty presentation. The ability to write a judicial opinion is not a crucial skill for a lawyer either; rather, the important skill, the one on which an educational argument might be hung, is the ability to understand a judicial opinion and act sensibly in the light of it. Law review training contributes not at all to this latter skill and, as to the former, the contribution is curious. As the old saw goes, it is the C students, not the A- student law review types, who become judges. One might say, of course, that it is the A students employed as clerks who need to know how to write an opinion. But that gets back to my point. Law review training is relevant for employers and for no one else-law clerks need to be able to write good John Henry Schlegel is Professor of Law, SUNY/Buffalo. © 1986 by the Association of American Law Schools. Cite as 35 J. Legal Educ. 18 (1986).

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