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12 J. Legal Educ. 424 (1959-1960)
Unfair Domination of Law Reviews

handle is hein.journals/jled12 and id is 436 raw text is: JOURNAL OF LEGAL EDUCATION UNFAIR DOMINATION OF LAW REVIEWS * RoY MORELAND t Mr. Justice Holmes once said: I trust that no one will understand me to be speaking with disrespect for the law, because I criticise it so freely. But one may criticise what one reveres. 1 Similarly, the writer speaks not with disrespect but with warm interest in law reviews in making the following criticisms and suggestions. The time has come for law reviews to adjust themselves to a changed scholastic world. The case system was practically the sole method of legal instruction in American law schools for seventy-five years. Recently, how- ever, it has had to yield a portion of its influence and domination to other methods of law teaching-particularly the seminar. For much of the past fifty or sixty years, law reviews have represented practically 'the sole outlet of student scholarship. Only the rare student has been admitted to the select circle of law review membership, normally the top ten per cent of the student body. The law school's professional pub- lication, thus, has belonged to a mere handful. Ordinarily, other students have received little instruction or experience in the use of the library or in the art of legal writing. The net result of this system has been that only the law review graduates have known how to use a library and do intelligent legal re- search. The ordinary student has lacked experience in any form of legal writing other than examination papers. As a consequence, the ordinary law school graduate has been of little value to a law firm for a year or two-until he has learned for himself how to use a law library and how to write like a lawyer. Naturally, the better law firms have shown little interest in those law graduates who were not law review men. That is understandable, but it is very unfair to the student who has not received this training. Many have recognized the inequity of the situation, but none have propounded a solution. With a breakdown in the domination of the case method of instruction and the supplemental use of the seminar in teaching, however, a partial solution to the problem becomes apparent. While the top papers in seminars will prob- ably continue to be written largely by those students who are in the top ten per cent of the class, superior papers are now occasionally written by others. Some students who do not have the qualities which seem requisite for high cumulative standings can produce a paper of real merit. If it meets the standards of the school's law review, such a paper should be considered for publication. Thus, two or three or more papers from non-law review students may well appear in a single issue of the review. This would have several merits: (1) it would encourage the ordinary student to write publishable material; (2) the review would belong, in a much more realistic sense, to the whole student body; and (3) this procedure, aided by the fact that every student in a good law school under the present : This paper merely suggests the problem In the hope that others will also feel inclined to discuss it and to offer additional suggestions toward its solution. t Professor of Law, University of Kentucky. 1 Holmes, The Path of the Law, 10 HAnv.L.Rzv. 457, 473 (1897). [VOL. 12

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