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36 J. Legal Educ. 21 (1986)
I Have Seen the Enemy and They Are Us

handle is hein.journals/jled36 and id is 31 raw text is: I Have Seen the Enemy and
They Are Us
Elyce H. Zenoff
No longer is it the insurgents who occasionally snipe at the student-edited
law reviews. The establishment has joined the fray and seems to be about to
replace the insurgents' occasional hit-and-run actions with a full-scale
attack that may eliminate, take over, or supplement the reviews by creating
faculty publications. Before a major offensive is mounted and some
hundred-plus law schools line up behind a leader-and march down the
yellow brick road to the Emerald City where all the journals will publish
our articles and those of the writers we like while rejecting, tactfully, all
articles we find tedious-perhaps a few moments should be spent pondering
how legal scholarship reached this sorry state. Little time need be spent
discussing what is wrong. On that there seems to be general agreement.
Published articles lack originality, are boring, too long,' too numerous,2
and have too many footnotes,3 which also are boring and too long.
Unpublished articles are- creative, sprightly, short, and either devoid of
footnotes or use them sparingly.
Elyce H. Zenoff is Professor of Law, The George Washington University. In the interests of full
disclosure, the author admits to being addicted to the writing of law review articles and to
reading and writing substantive footnotes.
As for the title. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations does not include this one. Several colleagues
and my children assure me that it was written by Walt Kelly, and appears in Pogo for President
(1964). The page reference is missing because no library in the District of Columbia has the
book, our house copy disappeared, and the volume is out of print.
I. The size of the twenty producer schools' law reviews increased substantially over the past
thirty years. A comparison of the length of the volumes they published in the years 1954-
1955 and 1984-1985 indicates an average increase of 477 pages per volume. Nineteen of the
twenty law reviews examined showed marked increases in volume length: Berkeley 46.3
percent, Chicago 36.5 percent, Columbia 69.2 percent, Cornell 36. 5 percent, Duke 74.8
percent, Georgetown 167.2 percent, George Washington 13 percent, Harvard 34 percent,
Illinois 38.3 percent, Iowa Ild percent, Michigan 63 percent, Minnesota 41.2 percent,
Northwestern 80 percent, University of Pennsylvania 41 percent, Stanford 113.5 percent.
Texas 46 percent, Virginia 46.5 percent. Wisconsin 148 percent, and Yale 35.1 percent.
Increased length is not simply a result of publishing more articles. In seventeen of the
twenty publications the length of the articles in the first issue of the current volume were
longer on average than those in the comparable 1954-1955 issue.
2. There are 250 school-centered law reviews. See Roger C. Cramton's article. The Most
Remarkable Institution: The American Law Review. in this issue of the JLE.
3. Contrary to what many of us might believe, footnotes per page did not increase
substantially in the years studied (in nine reviews footnotes increased, in one there was little
or no change, and in nine, footnotes per page decreased.) The total number of footnotes for
the issues compared increased, however. because the recent articles are longer.
Q 1986 by the Association of American Law Schools. Cite as 35 J. Legal Educ. 21 (1986).

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