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1989 Wis. L. Rev. 739 (1989)
A Plea for Readable Law Review Articles

handle is hein.journals/wlr1989 and id is 753 raw text is: ESSAY A PLEA FOR READABLE LAW REVIEW ARTICLES W. LAWRENCE CHURCH* There can be no doubt about the need for thorough, well-docu- mented articles about the law, or about the suitability of recognized academic law journals as the place for such articles. Our legal system would clearly suffer if the pool of scholarly articles researching and often criticizing the law were to dry up. At the same time, there is a legitimate criticism that can be levied at the current law review focus on exhaustively detailed articles, namely, that many of them are too long and complex to be of much real value in advancing legal discourse. This Essay-which will be short, of course- will discuss some of the limitations of the articles that currently domi- nate the law reviews. It will also recommend an obvious remedy: that the reviews devote at least a few of their pages to a different sort of article, one that is shorter and simpler to read, and, hence, one that can serve to promote broadly based discourse in the law. PROBLEMS WITH THE CURRENT FORMAT All concerned have known for a long time that a large part of the legal community does not read the articles that fill America's law re- views. Partly, this is because some of the articles are too theoretical to be of use to many of their potential readers. However, this is not the only difficulty. Another major cause for concern derives from the way in which many of the articles are written-the point here at issue. Some of this must be ascribed to the numbing, legal/bureaucratic style that has typified legal writing for decades. Another factor, one which seems to be growing slowly worse, is that many articles are so detailed and complex, so convoluted, that general readers simply cannot be expected to make it through them. For many of these articles, certainly for the best of them, the prob- lem is not a failure to provide careful consideration of the issues with which they deal. The difficulty is, rather, that the useful part of the arti- cle, the part that makes the author's own contributions to theory and understanding, is buried under a mass of supplemental dross. The arti- * Professor of Law, University of Wisconsin Law School

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