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Some
revolutions begin with great fanfare; others start unnoticed. The
rise of the blogger is perhaps the most heralded development in the
world of legal education since the first rankings of U.S. News &
World Report. The number of legal bloggers, as determined in the
latest online census, stands at over 300.1
Symposia on the growth of legal blogs have been held, written about,
and “live-blogged.”2
The focus on blogging within the law coincides with the larger
cultural attention being paid to bloggers across the spectrum.
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When
Judge John Noonan wrote about law reviews in the Stanford Law
Review back in 1995, he likened them to cathedrals.1
Just as every self-respecting medieval town had one, every
self-respecting law school must have one. Schools that aspire to
high rankings need more than one, actually. I might use a different
analogy, more closely related to dissemination of written knowledge:
every self-respecting 19th century town needed a newspaper—sometimes
a lot of them. And just as we look back to newspapers and other
literary output to gauge something about the culture of the 19th
century, we can judge a school by its law review. In focusing on
this theme (of the connections between law review quality and law
school ranking), we can help improve legal scholarship and perhaps
legal education as well.
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Even
articles that have criticized the institution of the law review tend
to note some of the benefits of law reviews such as signaling quality
students to employers, imparting rigor to the thought and writing of
students via the editing process, and enhancing a law school’s
competitiveness. Such functions are the inefficient by-products of
law reviews. The core business of law reviews—at least prior to
recent years—seems to have been one of filtering article
quality toward more or less prestigious journals, distributing
subsidized funding throughout the industry, and disseminating for
access and archival storage the printed copies of articles. Although
filtering via the mechanism of reputation is an interesting one, the
focus here is on law review economics and the industry’s
movement away from print copies. Read More...
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“Look
at me! Grade me! Evaluate and rank me! I’m good, good, good
and oh so smart!”
– Lisa Simpson1
As
another entrant into the fast-growing ranks of online law review
supplements, the Connecticut Law Review has chosen to begin by
contemplating—or is that “CONNtemplating?”—an
ambiguous phrase: “Law Reviews Matter: Legal Scholarship, Law
Reviews, and the Online Age.” We might read that open-ended
phrase in several ways. Perhaps most interestingly, it might be read
as inviting us to think about the “matter”—the
pronouncements, extrusions, eruptions, and, alas, ephemera—contained
within the law review format, and its increasing emigration to an
infinite online space, on SSRN, Bepress, blogs, and elsewhere. We
might also read it as a positive pronouncement: no matter how
battered by their many critics or by competition from online sources,
law reviews do matter, damn it. But the very act of making
that pronouncement, the very need to make the assertion, cannot help
but lead readers to supply the question mark the editors have seen
fit to omit. In an “online age” in which “legal
scholarship,” in its many forms, can be propagated with ease
and without the assistance of the law review and its editors, do
“Law Reviews Matter?” Read More...
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This Essay, solicited by the Connecticut Law Review for the inauguration of its online companion CONNtemplations, discusses the main structural deficiencies of student-edited general interest paper-based law reviews, namely that they are student-edited, general interest and paper-based.
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If you’re reading this, you must not be a federal judge.
According to a March 2007 article in the New York Times, legal scholarship has become too ethereal and abstract to be of any practical use to federal judges in their everyday disposition of cases.1 In the words of Dennis G. Jacobs, Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, “I haven’t opened up a law review in years. . . . No one speaks of them. No one relies on them.”2 Paraphrasing 19th century Scottish writer Andrew Lang, Second Circuit Judge Robert Sack went even further, suggesting that, even when judges do cite law review articles today, they “use them like drunks use lampposts,” i.e., “more for support than for illumination.”3
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