Harvard Law Review
Disobedience, medical disobedience.
America’s medical conscience regime is broken. Doctors or nurses who conscientiously deny care get shielded from being sued, fired, or prosecuted — even if they don’t tell patients what their options are.… Feb 10, 2023
Article by Dov Fox
Corporate Law
Public reporting of monitorship outcomes.
When a corporation engages in misconduct that is widespread or pervasive, courts, regulators, or prosecutors often insist that the firm obtain assistance from an independent third party — a monitor — to oversee the… Jan 10, 2023
Article by Veronica Root Martinez
Content Moderation
Content moderation as systems thinking.
The stylized picture of content moderation that forms the basis for most regulatory and academic discussion of online speech governance is misleading and incomplete. That picture depicts content moderation as… Dec 12, 2022
Article by Evelyn Douek
Statutory Interpretation
The common law as statutory backdrop.
Amidst the whirl of commentary about how the U.S. Supreme Court has become increasingly textualist and what precise shape modern textualism should take, the Court’s continued reliance on one decidedly… Dec 12, 2022
Article by Anita S. Krishnakumar
Consumer Law
Assembly-line plaintiffs.
The full text of this Article may be found by clicking on the PDF link to the left. Around the country, state courts are being flooded with the claims of… May 10, 2022
Article by Daniel Wilf-Townsend
Fourth Amendment
The aftermath of carpenter : an empirical study of fourth amendment law, 2018-2021.
The full text of this Article may be found by clicking on the PDF link to the left. Fourth Amendment law is in flux. The Supreme Court recently established, in… May 10, 2022
Article by Matthew Tokson
Trademark Law
Navigating the identity thicket: trademark’s lost theory of personality, the right of publicity, and preemption.
Both trademark and unfair competition laws and state right of publicity laws protect against unauthorized uses of a person’s identity. Increasingly, however, these rights are working at odds with one… Mar 10, 2022
Article by Jennifer E. Rothman
Discrimination
Discriminatory taint.
The truism that history matters can hide complexities. Consider the idea of problematic policy lineages. When may we call a policy the progeny of an earlier, discriminatory policy, especially if… Mar 10, 2022
Article by W. Kerrel Murray
Separation of Powers
Enforcement lawmaking and judicial review.
It is — and has long been — well known that the Executive’s power is expanding. To date, there are two dominant analyses of the judiciary’s role in that expansion:… Feb 10, 2022
Article by Z. Payvand Ahdout
Data Federalism
Private markets for individual data have received significant and sustained attention in recent years. But data markets are not for the private sector alone. In the public sector, the federal… Feb 10, 2022
Article by Bridget A. Fahey
Publishing in Law Reviews and Journals
Publishing in law reviews and journals-home, deciding where to publish, article submission services, author rights, sharing and depositing your papers, conferences and symposia, books, articles and other resources, writing competitions, videos of classes and presentations, tutorial and quiz, getting help.
Have you thought about trying to publish in a law review or journal? This guide contains a variety of resources to help you in that process.
Submit to DASH, Harvard University's open access repository
Fill out our form to submit your paper to Harvard University's open access repository, DASH
This guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License .
You may reproduce any part of it for noncommercial purposes as long as credit is included and it is shared in the same manner.
Comparing Law Journal Impact Factor/Prestige
Over the years, many ranking systems for law journals have evolved, incorporating a variety of methodologies and factors, including frequency of citation, prominence of author, etc.. Although such rankings can be useful for getting an idea of the prestige or "impact factor" of a journal, they should be taken with a grain of salt and in consideration of other factors that might be important to you. Ranking of journals is frequently a subject of articles and blog postings. Play close attention to how the data was compiled---e.g. through database searches, opinions of experts in the field, etc..
Law Journal Submissions and Ranking The Washington & Lee Law School Library produces this site that lists law journals by subject, country and other factors, and allows users to rank journals by impact factor or immediacy index. (Both are based on citation counts more or less, see ranking methodology ). Provides contact and submission information.
Allen Rostron & Nancy Levit, I nformation for Submitting Articles to Law Reviews & Journals (2021).
Michael Goodyear, Information for Submitting Articles to Specialty & Non-Flagship Law Journals (2021)
Nancy Levit et al, Submission of Law Student Articles for Publication (last updated 2016).
ISI Journal Citation Reports (Harvard ID and PIN required) Ranks journals in a wide range of disciplines including about 100 law journals. Rankings are based on citation counts in thousands of journals in the sciences and social sciences. From the initial screen, select Social Sciences Edition and View a group of journals by Subject Category (the default). On the next screen, select Law and View journal data by either Impact Factor, Immediacy Index, or Cited Half Life.
Most Cited Journals on HeinOnline This top 100 list is based on HeinOnline's citator feature called ScholarCheck. You can also use ScholarCheck to create your own metric. They also have a collection of most-cited law journals .
Eigenfactor This is a relatively new system that ranks journals as Google ranks websites (mapping relationship structures). The coverage of law is not comprehensive, but it is useful for looking at journals in the context of the social sciences generally.
Google Scholar Metrics Google Scholar launched publication metrics in April 2012. They provide five-year h-index and h-median numbers for ranking purposes.
Bryce Clayton Newell, Meta-Ranking, Law Journal Meta-Ranking 2020 Edition, Meta-Ranking of Flagship US Law Reviews
Measuring Quality - Writing for and Publishing in Law Reviews (Choosing Where to Submit and Publish) A great guide compiled by the Gallagher Library at the University of Washington Law School, explaining the most common ranking factors, including important an extensive selection of articles and surveys.
Brian T. Detweiler, May It Please the Court: A Longitudinal Study of Judicial Citation to Academic Legal Periodicals
U.S. News To Publish Law Faculty Scholarly Impact Ranking In 2021
Accessibility of the Content
Is the journal available in places where scholars will find, and hopefully cite to, its contents? Some considerations include:
Is it open access or freely available? Check the journal's website for contents and the journal's policy. You can also check the Directory of Open Access Journals , but the coverage for law is not extensive.
Is it in Westlaw, Lexis and other subscription databases?
Is it indexed by Legaltrac (a.k.a Legal Resource Index)? See title list .
Is it indexed by Index to Legal Periodicals and Books? Consult journal directory . Select Index to Legal Periodicals and Books, then Display List.
Is it included in Tables of Contents Services, such as Current Index to Legal Periodicals? (See title list .)
Selected Directories of Law Journals
In addition to Washington and Lee's Law Review Submissions and Ranking website , there are several directories that can be used to find out more information about law journals that are currently being published.
- Directory of Law Reviews and Scholarly Legal Publications (LexisNexis; out-of-date)
- Ulrich's Periodicals Not specific to law, Ulrich's describes periodicals in all disciplines, worldwide. Most comprehensive source for finding law-related serial publications. Includes newspapers, bar journals, and trades. Usually provides a description, contact information, circulation figures, abstracting and indexing services, and links to publishers' sites. Use Advanced Search to find appropriate journals. At minimum, you may want to limit Country of Publication to United States, Subject to law, Status to Active, and Serial Type to Academic/Scholarly.
- Directory for Successful Publishing in Legal Periodicals Call Number: Reference K 36.J69 1997x A bit out of date but still useful. Covers about 500 major law journals. Describes the journal's particular focus, preferred manuscript style; acceptance rates, details about the review process, and occasionally explains factors in manuscript rejections.
Short-Form Publishing
Many law reviews now have blogs and websites that accept shorter submissions. See Colin Miller's Submission Guide for Online Law Review Supplements, Version 7.0 and Information for Submitting to Online Law Review Companions by Bridget J. Crawford :: SSRN Washington & Lee also lists selected ones on its Law Journals: Submissions and Ranking website .
- Information for Submitting to Online Law Review Companions
Scholastica
Scholastica pilot program.
The Harvard Law School is piloting a program to subsidize Scholastica journal submissions for current students with publishable academic work.
Eligibility
To access this support, you must receive sign-off from your faculty supervisor that your article is ready for submission and/or that submission will further your academic goals.
Before we activate your account, please attend a Library workshop or set up an appointment with a librarian to discuss strategy and how to select journals for submission. We also encourage you to review the Law Library’s Guide to Publishing in Law Reviews and Journals.
How to Participate
Send a request using your Harvard email to [email protected] . Include or separately forward the approval from your faculty supervisor.
How it Works
Once we receive your request and faculty approval and you have attended training or met with a librarian, Library staff will add you to our Scholastica account. Once you acknowledge our invitation, you will be free to begin your submissions. Your account will remain active through the end of the pilot unless you reach your maximum number of submissions
Submission Levels
- SJD– up to 50 submissions ($325) per academic year during your time at HLS
- LLMs – up to 50 submissions ($325) total during your year at HLS.
- JDs – up to 50 submissions ($325) total during your three years at HLS.
Note: Please keep track of your journal submissions and notify us when you reach 50, as Scholastica does not limit them automatically.
NOTE: ExpressO shut down its services. The last date for Law Review submissions through its service was March 31, 2021. Its complete shutdown of services was June 30, 2021.
JOURNAL POLICIES FOR SUBMISSION
Allen Rostron and Nancy Levit compiled a table of journal policies for publication, Allen Rostron & Nancy Levit Information for Submitting Articles to Law Reviews & Journals (2021).
Sherpa/RoMEO is a searchable database of publisher's general policies regarding copyright and the self-archiving of journal articles on the web and in Open Access repositories. Each entry provides a summary of the publisher's policy, including what version of an article can be deposited, where it can be deposited, and any conditions that are attached to that deposit.
How You Can Submit an Article
Journals have different policies for receiving submissions. Your best starting place is to check the journal's website, which usually provides details about its policy. We have collected on this page some potential resources that you can use for submitting an article.
Learn about Author Rights
If you do get an acceptance for publication, you might be asked to sign an author agreement/contract with the publisher. Some standard agreements require things such as transferring copyright or prohibiting what you can do with your own work. See Benjamin J. Keele, Advising Faculty on Law Journal Publication Agreements for a brief basic review of terms to consider.
SPARC Author Rights
- Author Rights and the SPARC Author Addendum
Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine
Hosted by Science Commons, you can enter the article information and choose the rights you want to retain and generate a standard addendum on pdf to provide for the publisher's consideration. http://scholars.sciencecommons.org/
Keep Your Copyrights
Developed by the Kernochan Center for Law, Media, and the Arts and the Program on Law & Technology at Columbia Law School , this website provides a good introduction to author rights and samples of contract language.
- http://www.keepyourcopyrights.org/
Creative Commons Licenses
Resources to learn about journal copyright and self-archiving policies.
Journal publication agreements vary widely, but there are some resources that help authors get an idea of what a journal's standard policy has typically been. While the journal publication agreement itself must always be reviewed, looking at these resources at the time of submission can be helpful, particularly if it is important for you to retain certain rights in your work. Regardless of what a publisher's standard agreement states, you can always try to negotiate different terms. If the publisher is unwilling to budge from its position, you then need to decide how important it is to you to publish in that particular journal.
- SHERPA/RoMEO This website lists contains summaries of permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher's agreement.
- copyrightexperiences wiki Focused on law reviews, this wiki encourages authors to include information about their experiences with individuals journals.
- Benjamin Keele, Copyright Provisions in Law Journal Publication Agreements
- Dan Hunter, Walled Gardens
- Brian Frye, Christopher Ryan, Franklin Runge, An Empirical Study of Law Journal Copyright Practices
Working papers and self-archiving
Regardless of your plans for formal publication of your work, you are encouraged to deposit your student papers with the university's open access repository, DASH . Doing so will enable you to share your work with other members of the Harvard community, as well as the world at large. If you are concerned about making your content available open on the Internet, you also have the option of submitting only the metadata (e.g. title, your name). See HLS Student Papers Series in DASH for details.
You might also want to deposit your paper (or its metadata) in SSRN or another working paper repository to associate yourself with the work and make it available for feedback from others in the field. Scholars frequently make their "working papers" or drafts available for early feedback and reaction from colleagues.
The SSRN Legal Scholarship Network hosts research paper series for academic and other research organizations such as the Harvard Law School, Public Law & Legal Theory Research Paper Series . Scholars can publish their work in a large number of law-related e-journals within SSRN's Legal Scholarship Network's four areas including Law & Economics, Public Law & Legal Theory, Legal Studies and Law Research Center Papers.
Author Identification
Giving the proper author credit for research is the goal of Open Researcher and Contributor ID ( ORCID ) iDs. ORCID is a non-profit, community-driven, Open Access effort to create a registry of unique researcher identifiers.
“ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between you and your professional activities ensuring that your work is recognized.”
As a benefit to our HLS scholars who regularly publish in SSRN , it is now possible to edit the personal information page in your SSRN account to link to your ORCID Record. Register here for your new ORCID.
Research Profile Services
- [email protected]
- Google Scholar Citations
- Microsoft Academic
- Academia.edu
- Conference Alerts
This resource tracks academic conferences worldwide, including ones concerning law. E-mail alerts are available.
- Legal Scholarship Blog
A Service from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law & University of Washington School of Law, which tracks Law-Related Calls for Papers, Conferences, and Workshops . You can sign up for alerts of new additions.
Annuals and Surveys Appearing in Legal Periodicals
- Annuals and Surveys Appearing in Legal Periodicals by Catherine L. Kerr and Joy Humphrey Call Number: Reference KF8 .K47 1996 ISBN: 0837793122 Tracks surveys appearing in law reviews, bar association journals and annuals. Arranged by jurisdiction and subject.
Selected books
Other Guides
- Writing for and Publishing in Law Reviews (Gallagher Law Library, University of Washington School of Law) This very extensive guide covers various aspects of publishing.
- Brian D. Galle, The Law Review Submission Process: A Guide for (and by) the Perplexed
- Scholastica Resources Run by the submission service Scholastica, there are various resources/tips (written from the perspective of a service provider) including their blog .
Blogs/Current Awareness
- Brian Leiter Law School Reports
- PrawfsBlawg
- Faculty Lounge
HLS also offers many prizes for its students papers generally. See Harvard Law School Writing Prizes for more information.
Often included in many student writing competitions is the opportunity to have your work published in a journal. See Awards and Competitions (HLS Program on the Legal Profession) for a list of competitions.
- Writing Competitions (Pence Law Library Guide)
- Writing Competitions and Contests (ABA for Law Students)
- Tutorial and quiz to obtain Scholastica account (HarvardKey required)
Contact Us!
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- Last Updated: Aug 17, 2022 1:09 PM
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What Is a Law Review and How Is It Important?
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You may have heard the term “Law Review” thrown around in popular movies like The Paper Chase and A Few Good Men , but what is it and why is having this phrase on your resume a benefit?
What a Law Review Is
In the context of law school, a law review is an entirely student-run journal that publishes articles written by law professors, judges, and other legal professionals; many law reviews also publish shorter pieces written by law students called “notes” or “comments.”
Most law schools have a “main” law review that features articles from a wide variety of legal subjects and often has “Law Review” in the title, for example, Harvard Law Review ; this is the “Law Review” addressed in this article. In addition to Law Review, most schools also have several other law journals that each focus on one particular area of the law, such as the Stanford Environmental Law Journal or the Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy .
Generally, students join Law Review in their second year of law school, although some schools also permit third-year students to try out for Law Review as well. Each school’s process for selecting Law Review staff differs, but many have a write-on competition at the close of first-year exams during which students are given a packet of material and are asked to write a sample note or comment within a specified time frame. An editing exercise is often required, as well.
Some law reviews offer invitations to participate based solely on first-year grades, while other schools use a combination of grades and write-on competition results to select members. Those who accept invitations will become law review staff members.
Law review staff members are responsible for cite checking—making sure that statements are supported with authority in footnotes and also that the footnotes are in the correct Bluebook form. Editors for the following year are selected by the current year’s editorial staff, usually through an application and interview process.
Editors oversee the running of the law review, from selecting the articles to assigning work to staff members; there is often no faculty involvement at all.
Why You Should Want to Get on Law Review
The biggest reason that you should try to get on law review is that employers, particularly large law firms and judges selecting law clerks, love to interview students who have participated in Law Review, especially as an editor.
Why? Because students on Law Review have spent many hours doing precisely the kind of in-depth, meticulous legal research and writing that is required of attorneys and law clerks .
A potential employer who sees Law Review on your resume knows that you have been through rigorous training, and will likely think that you are intelligent and have a strong work ethic, eye for detail, and excellent writing skills.
But Law Review can be useful even if you don’t plan on working in a big law firm or don't plan on clerking, particularly if you plan to pursue an academic legal career. Law Review can give you a great start on the road to becoming a law professor, not only because of the editing experience but also through the opportunity of having your own note or comment published.
On a more personal level, participating in Law Review can also provide a support system as you and the other members are going through the same things at the same time. And you also might even enjoy reading the submitted articles and getting to know the Bluebook in and out.
Serving on Law Review requires an enormous time commitment, but for most members, the benefits greatly outweigh any negative aspects.
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Legal Citation Guide: Law Review Articles
- U.S. Constitution
- Law Review Articles
A law review article is essentially a scholarly article about a legal issue or topic. Therefore, they are cited the same way your citation style recommends citing journal articles. See below for examples from APA, MLA, and Chicago style.
HPU Libraries subscribes to HeinOnline, which contains a collection dedicated to full-text law review articles.
APA and MLA Style
Author(s). (Year of Publication). Title of article: Subtitle of article. Journal Title in Italics, volume number (issue number), page numbers. https://doi.org/10.xxxxxxxxxx
Reference list:
Fee, J. (2020). The freedom of speech-conduct. Kentucky Law Journal, 109 (1), 81-126.
In-text: (Fee, 2020)
Note: If there is no DOI listed and the article was retrieved online, include the URL. Do not, however, include URLS to library databases or any subscription not accessible to your reader. In this case, just leave off this part and format it as a print article.
Lastname, Firstname, MI. “Article Title.” Journal Title in Italics , vol. #, no. #, Season Publication Date, Page(s). Title of Database, URL.
Works Cited:
Fee, John. "The Freedom of Speech-Conduct." Kentucky Law Journal , vol.109, no.1, 2020,
pp.81-126. HeinOnline , https://heinonline-org.libproxy.highpoint.edu/HOL/P?
h=hein.journals/kentlj109&i=91.
In-text: (Fee 112)
Tips & FAQs
Q. Are law reviews primary or secondary sources?
A. Law review articles are considered secondary sources, as they are analyzing and interpreting the law. Statutes and case documents are considered primary sources.
For academic citation styles, be sure to spell out the name of the journal in which the article appears (you may see them abbreviated in strict Bluebook examples).
Chicago Style
Lastname, Firstname, MI. "Article Title." Journal Title in Italics volume #, no. # (Publication Date): Page(s). Accessed month day, year. URL.
Bibliography:
Fee, John. "The Freedom of Speech-Conduct." Kentucky Law Journal 109, no. 1 (2020): 81-126.
Accessed June 28, 2021. https://heinonline-org.libproxy.highpoint.edu/HOL/P
?h=hein.journals/kentlj109&i=91.
1. John Fee, "The Freedom of Speech-Conduct," Kentucky Law Journal 109, no. 1 (2020):
81-126, accessed June 28, 2021. https://heinonline-org.libproxy.highpoint.edu/HOL/P
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- Last Updated: Nov 9, 2021 10:16 AM
- URL: https://guides.highpoint.edu/legal_citation
The Boston University Law Review provides analysis and commentary on all areas of the law. Published seven times per year, the Law Review contains articles contributed by law professors and practicing attorneys from all over the world, along with notes written by Law Review staff.
2022-2023 Boston University Law Review Members
Membership Requirements
We admit approximately fifteen percent of the students from the first-year class into the Law Review each year. Law Review staff are selected on the basis of a writing competition, grades, and a personal statement. Transfer students may complete the writing competition upon their acceptance to Boston University School of Law.
Contact Information
Phone: 617.353.3166 Email: [email protected]
Boston University Law Review 765 Commonwealth Avenue Boston, Massachusetts 02215
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The Fourth Amendment and General Law
This Article contends that courts should interpret the Fourth Amendment by looking to “general law”—common-law rules under the control of no particular sovereign. This approach finds strong support in the Fourth Amendment’s text, doctrine, and historical background, and would protect the Amendment’s…
The Antibody Patent Paradox
Shifts in patent law’s enablement and written description requirements make it impractical for patentees of antibody technologies to disclose and claim their inventions. We describe this as a doctrinal paradox and offer a solution that gives patentees the power to claim antibodies without giving the…
General Citizenship Rights
This Article explores ideas of citizenship rights from the Revolutionary Era through Reconstruction and challenges the conventional view that citizenship rights came in only two sets—state and national. It argues that Americans also widely recognized general citizenship rights, reflecting an older c…
The Perils and Promise of Public Nuisance
Public nuisance is a puzzle: both a medieval action and a contemporary force in large-scale opioid settlements, it has provoked historical, formalist, and institutional objections. Close examination reveals, however, that public nuisance adheres to the common law’s accepted bounds and can play an im…
Interconstitutionalism
Drawing on practice and convention from America and abroad, this Article documents the surprisingly robust role that past constitutions play in the interpretation of extant constitutions, and assesses what this pervasive practice tells us about theories of constitutional meaning, processes of consti…
Barbarians Inside the Gates: Raiders, Activists, and the Risk of Mistargeting
This Article argues that the conventional wisdom about corporate raiders and activist hedge funds—lambasting raiders and praising activists—is wrong. The authors explain how activists are more likely than raiders to engage in mistargeting , implying they are also more likely to destroy value and, ult…
The Administrative Agon: A Democratic Theory for a Conflictual Regulatory State
Scholars have long debated whether the administrative state is a democratic institution. This Article offers a new framework for analyzing this question—one drawn from agonistic democratic theory. It argues that agonism provides new grounding for the legitimacy of administrative agencies while also …
Open Access, Interoperability, and DTCC’s Unexpected Path to Monopoly
This Article argues that open-access and interoperability requirements helped the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation monopolize U.S. securities clearing and depository markets. DTCC’s path to monopoly offers a cautionary tale for policymakers seeking to use open access and interoperability to c…
Navassa: Property, Sovereignty, and the Law of the Territories
The U.S. acquired its first overseas territory—the island of Navassa, near Haiti—by conceptualizing it as property, rather than a piece of sovereign territory. The story of Navassa shows how the concept of property is central to the law of the territories—and, perhaps, a useful tool going forward.
The Insular Cases Run Amok: Against Constitutional Exceptionalism in the Territories
This Article calls on the Supreme Court to overrule—rather than repurpose—the Insular Cases , and it points to constitutional doctrines beyond their reach that can preserve cultural practices without spawning a crisis of political illegitimacy in the unincorporated territories.
Aurelius ’s Article III Revisionism: Reimagining Judicial Engagement with the Insular Cases and “The Law of the Territories”
The Article questions the wisdom of urging judicial overthrow of the Insular Cases without a rubric for the many doctrinal universes that might emerge from such an intervention. Ill-considered judicial intervention will pose a grave threat to procedurally legitimate self-determination and to path-de…
Indigenous Subjects
Centering on the wide-ranging implications of the Supreme Court’s decision in Rice v. Cayetano , this Article argues that the Court’s race jurisprudence threatens Indigenous self-determination and land rights in the territories. It concludes by offering several strategies that litigants can use to pr…
The Separation-of-Powers Counterrevolution
The Article traces modern separation-of-powers jurisprudence to the Court’s reaction to Reconstruction. Converting Lost Cause dogma into the language of constitutional law, the Court sparked a counterrevolution that obscures, and eclipses, a more normatively compelling conception—one that locates in…
Whose Child Is This? Improving Child-Claiming Rules in Safety-Net Programs
Benefit programs for families rely on rules to determine which individuals can claim which children. These rules shape who qualifies for a program and who does not. This Article critically assesses the design of child-claiming rules, using as case studies the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income T…
Free-World Law Behind Bars
In the “free world,” we look to regulatory rather than constitutional law to keep us healthy, safe, and connected. But inside prison walls, regulatory law recedes. This Article considers its failure to protect prisoners; its substantive, procedural, and normative advantages over constitutional law; …
The Antitrust Duty to Deal in the Age of Big Tech
Tech platforms are often accused of refusing to deal with their competitors. But courts have largely killed off antitrust liability for such behavior, citing concerns that it would chill investment in new technologies. This Article argues that antitrust can protect investment without needlessly stif…
The History Wars and Property Law: Conquest and Slavery as Foundational to the Field
The version of American history we adopt matters for our understanding of law. In property law, we overlook how the land system underpinning the American real estate market developed, and how that market grew through racial inequality, if we do not examine conquest and slavery as foundational to the…
Bankruptcy Grifters
Bankruptcy grifters infiltrate the Chapter 11 process, seeking bankruptcy’s benefits for mass-tort defendants without incurring many of its costs. This Article concludes that bankruptcy should not be a procedural panacea for companies facing litigation exposure, and offers a number of potential solu…
The Corporate Governance Gap
This Article offers an empirical account of the differences in governance practices between large- and small-cap companies, resulting in what this Article terms the “Corporate Governance Gap.” Recognizing a disparity in the operation of driving forces that promote governance practices, the Article p…
The Emergence of Neutrality
This Article traces the origins of the content and viewpoint neutrality principles in First Amendment law. It argues that these ideas emerged later than scholars have previously appreciated and that their development was tied to a broader Twentieth Century transformation in constitutional rights jur…
Disparate Limbo: How Administrative Law Erased Antidiscrimination
Does administrative law have a racial blind spot? Ceballos, Engstrom, and Ho examine “disparate limbo”: how claims that agencies caused racial disparities have come to evade review under both antidiscrimination and administrative law, and how ignoring race may have helped build modern administrative…
Rethinking Police Expertise
Judicial reasoning about police expertise has toggled between two distinct conceptions of expertise itself: as a professional virtue or a professional technology . Taking stock of both views offers new strategies in a range of disputes about police misconduct. It also illuminates debates about expert…
Unpacking Third-Party Standing
This Article “unpacks” the doctrine of third-party standing. First, it identifies true third-party standing problems by distinguishing them from first-party claims, largely by reference to the “zone of interests” concept. Second, it distinguishes among three types of parties invoking third-party sta…
Subordination and Separation of Powers
Liberty, accountability, and other values advanced by separation-of-powers tools such as the “power of the purse” come with real-world costs targeted at marginalized groups. Scholars and courts should account for such skewed impacts by including antisubordination among the values they consider in an…
Antitrust and Platform Monopoly
Large digital platforms often are not winner-take-all markets. As a result, antitrust has a role but breakup is rarely the right solution. Better options include incentivizing competition within the platform or forcing interoperability or information sharing. Current merger policy, however, is poorl…
The Constitutional Right of Self-Government
The Assembly Clause today serves little purpose. But long before the First Amendment ’ s drafting, American activists advanced what they called their right to “assemble” to defend their right to govern themselves. This Article argues that this right can be interpreted as a right to meaningfully partic…
A Critical Assessment of the Originalist Case Against Administrative Regulatory Power: New Evidence from the Federal Tax on Private Real Estate in the 1790s
The Supreme Court is poised to consider whether the Constitution’s original meaning is compatible with numerous and longstanding congressional laws delegating power to the bureaucracy to enact regulations affecting private rights within the United States. New evidence presented in this Article indic…
Equity as Meta-Law
This Article interprets equity as law about law, or meta-law. Equity specializes in solving complex and uncertain problems, especially those involving multiple parties, conflicting rights, and opportunism. The Article reconstructs this function, diagnoses the ills of current equity, and charts a pat…
Police Reform Through a Power Lens
This Article examines recent social movements efforts to shift power over policing to those most harmed by mass criminalization. This focus on power-shifting—the power lens—opens up reform discussions to first-order questions about how the state should provide safety and security, with or without po…
The Race-Blind Future of Voting Rights
The world of voting rights could soon be turned upside down. A conservative Supreme Court might insist that minority voters' existing representation be compared to the representation they would receive if the redistricting process were race blind. This Article is the first to explore the potential c…
Constructing Countervailing Power: Law and Organizing in an Era of Political Inequality
This Article proposes an innovative approach to addressing political inequality: using law to facilitate organizing by the poor and working class – as workers, tenants, debtors, and welfare beneficiaries. The Article offers a new direction for the literature on political inequality and critical less…
Retroactive Adjudication
This Article defends the inherent retroactivity of judicial lawmaking. It argues that there is no principled foundation for the Supreme Court’s non-retroactivity doctrine, and it provides an alternative framework: courts should always apply “new law” to old cases, and constrain its effects instead t…
Distorted Choice in Corporate Bankruptcy
Two new strategies—restructuring support agreements and deathtrap provisions—distort the voting process in nearly every big Chapter 11 case. Although they could be banned, this Article, the first comprehensive assessment, calls for a more nuanced approach, outlining four rules of thumb for determin…
Expounding the Constitution
This Article reinterprets Founding-era debates about constitutional interpretation as arguments over its nature. If analogous to public legislation, it would be read pragmatically; if more like private legislation, it would be construed narrowly. This insight provides vital context for contemporary …
The First Amendment and the Right(s) of Publicity
First Amendment analysis in right of publicity cases is notoriously troublesome. To remedy this nettlesome conflict, this Article disaggregates the distinct interests that support publicity laws, and then analyzes how these intersect with First Amendment values. By doing so it offers a navigational …
Commonsense Consent
How do ordinary people understand the concept of consent? This Article documents that laypersons, unlike most legal theorists, believe consent is compatible with fraud. It uses this discovery to revisit the so-called “riddle of rape-by-deception” and to interrogate the relationship between public at…
Federalism by Contract
Just as private parties use contracts to facilitate joint projects and nation-states use treaties to organize joint undertakings, our domestic governments use written instruments to formally coordinate their activities. This Article analyzes these distinctive contract-like instruments in which both …
Law Within Congress
What law governs Congress? This Article explores the importance of parliamentary precedent as a body of law and the House and Senate parliamentarians who make and enforce that law. Understanding this legal system sheds light on how Congress operates and on topics in public law more broadly.
Competition Wrongs
Drawing on various forms of business law, this Article argues that misconduct in the marketplace can wrong other market actors even though those actors did not have a right against the misconduct. This argument challenges traditional philosophical and legal assumptions about rights and accountabilit…
Respect, Individualism, and Colorblindness
The “colorblind” approach to equal protection purports to treat people as individuals. This Article excavates the philosophical foundations of that idea and argues that the Supreme Court has misconceived it. If the Court pursues colorblindness, it should do so not with indignation but with ambivalen…
The Wandering Officer
This Article conducts a systematic investigation of “wandering officers”—law-enforcement officers fired by one department who find work at another agency. It reports on the prevalence, labor mobility, and behavior of these officers. The Article also considers explanations for their continued employm…
Probable Cause Pluralism
According to the Supreme Court, the most important phrase in the Fourth Amendment, “ probable cause, ” is not possible to define. This Article disagrees. It proposes a novel and comprehensive account of probable cause—one that offers meaningful and predictable constraints on law enforcement , while avo…
The Strategies of Anticompetitive Common Ownership
This Article examines the mechanisms through which anticompetitive effects may arise when institutional investors hold stakes in competing firms. Most mechanisms, including cartel facilitation and passive failures to encourage competition, either lack empirical evidence or else are contrary to the i…
Plessy Preserved: Agencies and the Effective Constitution
Federal officials enforced a “separate but equal” framework for public housing long after Brown invalidated that principle. This administrative regime wrote segregation into U.S. cities, operating as the effective Constitution for decades. This Article asks why a liberal, reformist agency chose that…
The New National Security Challenge to the Economic Order
Changes in national security policy pose a fundamental challenge to international economic law. Security policies worldwide encompass many emerging threats, from cyber vulnerabilities to climate change. This expansion potentially undermines the ability of investment and trade treaties to discipline …
Secret Reason-Giving
The government often gives reasons in secret. Although secret reason-giving targets different audiences than public reason-giving, it confers some of the same benefits, including improved decisional quality and accountability. It also imposes important constraints on executive-branch legal and polic…
Paid on Both Sides: Quid Pro Quo Exchange and the Doctrine of Consideration
The doctrine of consideration in contract is home to the law’s only substantial account of quid pro quo exchange—one that withers under philosophical scrutiny. By fleshing out the idea that exchange involves reciprocal payments, this Article offers both an original theory of exchange and a reconcept…
Courts have often suggested that “bans” are per se unconstitutional. But what makes a regulation a ban and why should it matter? This Article addresses those questions, which are particularly pressing as the Supreme Court prepares to hear its first Second Amendment case in nearly a decade.
The Statutory Separation of Powers
Separation of powers operates as an underappreciated structural principle in subconstitutional domains. Using the relationship between federal energy agencies as its primary case study, this Article argues that Congress creates statutory schemes of separation, checks, and balances in its delegations…
The Lessons of Lone Pine
Lone Pine orders have become a prominent fixture of the mass-tort landscape. So far, the orders have been mostly heralded as an inventive way to streamline the resolution of complex cases. Complicating that consensus, this Article analyzes drawbacks associated with this potent device and advocates r…
Sex in Public
This Article provides the first history of sex discrimination in public accommodations. Fifty years ago, bars displayed “men-only” signs. Women held secondary status in leisure, professional, and financial institutions. In the 1970s, feminists challenged this discrimination. Sex equality came to sig…
The Claims of Official Reason: Administrative Guidance on Social Inclusion
Under the Trump Administration, the legal validity of Obama-era administrative guidance on social inclusion has been the subject of ongoing contest. This Article draws on the philosophy of law to argue that these policies were issued in a procedurally lawful manner and that they have induced legally…
Bias In, Bias Out
The rise of criminal justice risk assessment has generated concerns about its disparate racial impact. Yet the prevailing responses to this problem, this Article contends, are inadequate. The real issue is the nature of prediction itself, and this demands a fundamental rethinking of risk assessment …
Empire States: The Coming of Dual Federalism
In the standard account of federalism’s eighteenth-century origins, the Framers divided government power among two sovereigns to protect individual liberties. This Article offers an alternative history. It emphasizes that federalism was a form of centralization—a shift of authority from diffuse quas…
Sexual Privacy
New technology threatens the security of information about our intimate lives—our sexual privacy. This Article conceives of sexual privacy as a unique privacy interest that warrants more protection than traditional privacy laws offer. Instead, it suggests a new approach to protecting sexual privacy …
Pleading Poverty in Federal Court
Approximately forty million Americans live in poverty. Yet we know little about how they encounter the federal civil justice system. This Article provides the first survey of the in forma pauperis pleading standards of all ninety-four federal district courts. It reveals an inefficient and arbitrary …
Disparate Impact, Unified Law
Lower federal courts have recently converged on a two-part test for vote denial claims under section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Yet this status quo is doctrinally incoherent and constitutionally vulnerable. Courts, this Article contends, should look to disparate impact law to address these problems…
Regulatory Bundling
Administrative agencies can aggregate or disaggregate provisions during a single legislative rulemaking. Such regulatory bundling has been especially prevalent over the last two decades, with agencies including increasingly more subjects in their final rules. This Article explores this phenomenon, t…
The Forgotten History of Metes and Bounds
Property scholarship has long derided metes and bounds systems of land demarcation, largely accepting that standardized boundaries best facilitate economic growth. Through a case study of colonial New Haven, Connecticut, this Article suggests that metes and bounds descriptions actually provided earl…
Innovation Policy Pluralism
Intellectual property is not a monolith. It rewards innovators with temporary exclusive rights to their creations, and it conditions consumers’ access to such goods through proprietary pricing. Using this insight, this Article develops a more accurate framework for analyzing the innovation policy la…
An American Approach to Social Democracy: The Forgotten Promise of the Fair Labor Standards Act
This Article recovers an institutional experiment in the early history of the Fair Labor Standards Act as an example of democratic and egalitarian administrative law. The Act’s wage boards, the Article suggests, offer an alternative, participatory vision of governance in today’s age of growing polit…
What Should We Do After Work? Automation and Employment Law
The existing fortress of employment-based rights and benefits is falling apart. The dominant legal responses to fissuring fail to meet, and even exacerbate, the challenge of contemporary automation. The way forward, this Article contends, must begin by separating what workers’ entitlements should be…
Litigating Data Sovereignty
Internet disputes increasingly occur across borders. The key question, this Article contends, is not whether states can exert control over data, but rather the shape their exercises of sovereign power will take. Given this reality, application of sovereign-deference doctrines represents the best hop…
The New Class Blindness
An increasing number of judges argue that courts are flatly prohibited from taking class into account when interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment. Contesting that claim, this Article traces the persistence of class-related concerns in Fourteenth Amendment doctrine from the Warren Court to the present…
Transparency’s Ideological Drift
From the early twentieth century to the present, the concept of transparency in American law has drifted across the political spectrum. Originally linked with progressive causes, it is now associated primarily with libertarian or neoliberal aims. This Article traces this multigenerational transforma…
First-Person FOIA
This Article reveals that Freedom of Information Act requests at seven federal agencies are dominated by individuals seeking records about themselves, including immigration, investigation, and medical records. Yet FOIA is ill-suited to meet the vital needs of first-person requesters, and these reque…
The Obsolescence of Advertising in the Information Age
Online search renders most advertising obsolete for conveying product information. Today, the only purpose of most advertising is to persuade consumers to purchase products. Because the information function of advertising is now obsolete, this Article argues that the Federal Trade Commission should …
International Lobbying Law
Consultation rules allow nonstate actors to gain special access to international institutions. While consultation once was understood as a means of democratizing international institutions, to day, many consultants are industry and trade associations. This Article reframes these rules as a body of lo…
The New Law of the Child
This Article sets forth a new paradigm for describing, understanding, and shaping children’s relationship to law. The authors show how the existing legal regime focuses narrowly on state and parental control over children, and they propose a new framework that promotes a broader range of children’s …
Petitioning and the Making of the Administrative State
This Article traces the roots of the modern administrative state to the petition process, drawing on an original database of over 500,000 petitions submitted to Congress from the Founding until 1950. This institutional history provides a deeper functional and textual understanding of the administrat…
The Jurisprudence of Mixed Motives
How do various domains of law deal with mixed motives? Are we condemned by our darkest motive, forgiven according to our noblest, or something in between? This Article develops a precise descriptive vocabulary for how courts analyze motives, concluding that there are only four motive standards in co…
The De Facto Reporter’s Privilege
There is no formal, federal reporter’s privilege against disclosing confidential information. Drawing on new historical sources, this Article shows how all three branches of government have deployed a variety of de facto protections for reporters. These conclusions enrich our understanding of whethe…
Judging Ordinary Meaning
When we speak of ordinary meaning we are asking an empirical question—about the sense of a word or phrase that is most likely implicated in a given linguistic context. Linguists have developed computer-aided means of answering such questions. This Article proposes to import those methods into statut…
Dangerous Defendants
Bail reformers aspire to untether pretrial detention from wealth and condition it instead on the risk that a defendant will commit crime if released. In setting this risk threshold, this Article argues that there is no clear constitutional, moral, or practical basis for distinguishing between equall…
Government Hacking
The United States government hacks computer systems for law enforcement purposes. This Article provides the first comprehensive examination of how federal law regulates government malware, and argues that government hacking is inherently a Fourth Amendment search—a question on which the courts have …
Natural Rights and the First Amendment
This Article excavates the Founding Era approach to expressive freedom, which was grounded in a multifaceted understanding of natural rights that no longer survives in American constitutional thought. This forgotten history undercuts the Supreme Court’s recent insistence that the axioms of modern do…
Stuck! The Law and Economics of Residential Stagnation
America has become a nation of homebodies. This Article advances two central claims. First, declining interstate mobility rates create problems for federal macroeconomic policymaking. Second, the Article argues that governments, mostly at the state and local levels, have created a huge number of leg…
How Qualified Immunity Fails
This Article reports the findings of the largest and most comprehensive study to date of the role qualified immunity plays in constitutional litigation. I found that qualified immunity rarely served its intended role as a shield from discovery and trial in these cases.
The Nature of Parenthood
This Article explores what it means to fully vindicate gender and sexual-orientation equality in the law of parental recognition. It does so by situating the treatment of families formed through ART within a longer history of parentage. Inequalities that persist in contemporary…
Machine Testimony
Machines play increasingly crucial roles in establishing facts in legal disputes. Some machines convey information—the images of cameras, the measurements of thermometers, the opinions of expert systems. When a litigant offers a human assertion for its truth, the law subjects…
Inside the Agency Class Action
Federal agencies in the United States hear almost twice as many cases each year as all the federal courts. But agencies routinely avoid using tools that courts rely on to efficiently resolve large groups of claims: class actions and other complex litigation procedures. As a re…
Why Have We Criminalized Aggressive War?
On the dominant view, accepted by both defenders and critics of the criminalization of aggression, the criminal wrong of aggressive war is inflicted on the attacked state. This view is mistaken. It is true that whether a war is criminally aggressive is determined ordinarily by whether …
Tort Law Inside Out
For more than a century, scholars have been looking at tort law from the outside in. Theorists committed to external goals like efficient allocation of resources or moral justice have treated tort as a mere vehicle for the achievement of their policy preferences, rather than as a body …
The Origins of Judicial Deference to Executive Interpretation
Judicial deference to executive statutory interpretation—a doctrine now commonly associated with the Supreme Court’s decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council—is one of the central principles in modern American public law. Despite its significance, however, the doc…
Localist Administrative Law
To read the voluminous literature on administrative law is to inhabit a world focused almost exclusively on federal agencies. This myopic view, however, ignores the wide array of administrative bodies that make and implement policy at the local-government level. The administrativ…
The Perils of Experimentation
More than eighty years after Justice Brandeis coined the phrase “laboratories of democracy,” the concept of policy experimentation retains its currency as a leading justification for decentralized governance. This Article examines the downsides of experimentation, and in pa…
Shareholder Proposal Settlements and the Private Ordering of Public Elections
Reform of campaign finance disclosure has stalled in Congress and at various federal agencies, but it is steadily unfolding in a firm-by-firm program of private ordering. Today, much of what is publicly known about how individual public companies spend money to influence federal, s…
The Cycles of Separation-of-Powers Jurisprudence
abstract.The Supreme Court’s approach to the Constitution’s separation of powers is a puzzle. Although the Justices appear to agree on the doctrine’s goals, in almost every important line of cases the Court oscillates between hard-edged rules and open-textured standards. The Court’s seem…
The New Labor Law
Labor law is failing. Disfigured by courts, attacked by employers, and rendered inapt by a global and fissured economy, many of labor law’s most ardent proponents have abandoned it altogether. And for good reason: the law that governs collective organization and bargaining am…
Probate Lending
One of the most controversial trends in American civil justice is litigation lending: corporations paying plaintiffs a lump sum in return for a stake in a pending lawsuit. Although causes of action were once inalienable, many jurisdictions have abandoned this bright-line prohibitio…
The President’s Budget as a Source of Agency Policy Control
A large body of literature in administrative law discusses presidential control of executive agencies through centralized review of regulations in the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), part of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Largely…
Foundling Fathers: (Non-)Marriage and Parental Rights in the Age of Equality
The twentieth-century equality revolution established the principle of sex neutrality in the law of marriage and divorce and eased the most severe legal disabilities traditionally imposed upon nonmarital children. Formal equality under the law eluded nonmarital parents, however…
Administrative Forbearance
This Article investigates the normative and constitutional case for a particular form of congressional delegation that is of increasing practical importance: delegations that give agencies the power to deprive statutory provisions of legal force and effect, a power this Artic…
Governance Reform and the Judicial Role in Municipal Bankruptcy
Recent proceedings involving large municipalities such as Detroit, Stockton, and Vallejo illustrate both the utility and limitations of using the Bankruptcy Code to adjust municipal debt. In this Article, we contend that, to resolve fully the distress of a substantial city, mun…
Professional Speech
Professionals speak in the course of exercising their profession. At the same time, the state can regulate the professions. What is the permissible scope of regulation of the professions as distinct from regulation of professional speech? This Article provides a comprehensive a…
The Lost “Effects” of the Fourth Amendment: Giving Personal Property Due Protection
In addition to “persons, houses, [and] papers,” the Constitution protects individuals against unreasonable searches and seizures of “effects.” However, “effects” have received considerably less attention than the rest of the categories in the Fourth Amendment. Rec…
The First Patent Litigation Explosion
The twenty-first century “patent litigation explosion” is not unprecedented. In fact, the nineteenth century saw an even bigger surge of patent cases. During that era, the most prolific patent enforcers brought hundreds or even thousands of suits, dwarfing the efforts of toda…
Corporate Control and Idiosyncratic Vision
This Article offers a novel theory of corporate control. It does so by shedding new light on corporate-ownership structures and challenging the prevailing model of controlling shareholders as essentially opportunistic actors who seek to reap private benefits at the expense of minor…
The Un-Territoriality of Data
Territoriality looms large in our jurisprudence, particularly as it relates to the government’s authority to search and seize. Fourth Amendment rights turn on whether the search or seizure takes place territorially or extraterritorially; the government’s surveillance authorit…
Political Entrenchment and Public Law
Courts and legal scholars have long been concerned with the problem of “entrenchment”—the ways that incumbents insulate themselves and their favored policies from the normal processes of democratic change. But this wide swath of case law and sch…
Against Immutability
Courts often hold that antidiscrimination law protects “immutable” characteristics, like sex and race. In a series of recent cases, gay rights advocates have persuaded courts to expand the concept of immutability to include not just those traits an individual cannot change, but…
The President and Immigration Law Redux
In November 2014, President Obama announced his intention to dramatically reshape immigration law through administrative channels. Together with relief policies announced in 2012, his initiatives would shield nearly half the population of unauthorized immigrants from removal and en…
The New Corporate Web: Tailored Entity Partitions and Creditors’ Selective Enforcement
Firms have developed sophisticated legal mechanisms that partition assets across some dimensions but not others. The result is a complex web of interconnected affiliates. For example, an asset placed in one legal entity may serve as collateral guaranteeing the debts of anot…
Defining and Punishing Offenses Under Treaties
One of the principal aims of the U.S. Constitution was to give the federal government authority to comply with its international legal commitments. The scope of Congress’s constitutional authority to implement treaties has recently received particu…
Administrative Severability Clauses
Severability clauses can help administrative agencies minimize the damage caused by judicial review and can make the regulatory environment more efficient, participatory, and predictable. Yet agencies rarely include these clauses in their rules becaus…
The Constitutional Duty To Supervise
The IRS targets Tea Party organizations’ applications for nonprofit tax-exempt status for special scrutiny. Newly opened online federal health exchanges fail to function. Officials at some Veterans Administration hospitals engage in widespread falsi…
Architectural Exclusion: Discrimination and Segregation Through Physical Design of the Built Environment
The built environment is characterized by man-made physical features that make it difficult for certain individuals—often poor people and people of color—to access certain places. Bridges were designed to be so low that buses could not pass under …
Article III Judicial Power, the Adverse-Party Requirement, and Non-Contentious Jurisdiction
Students of Article III have so far failed to resolve a fundamental tension in the theory of federal adjudication. On the one hand, Article III has been said to limit the federal courts to the resolution of concrete disputes between adverse parties, one of whom seeks redress for an …
Beyond Diversification: The Pervasive Problem of Excessive Fees and "Dominated Funds" in 401(k) Plans
Notwithstanding ERISA’s fiduciary requirements, a significant portion of 401(k) plans establish investment menus that predictably lead investors to hold high-cost portfolios. Using data from more than 3,500 401(k) plans with more than $120 billion i…
The Uneasy Case for Favoring Long-Term Shareholders
This Article challenges a persistent and pervasive view in corporate law and corporate governance: that a firm’s managers should favor long-term shareholders over short-term shareholders, and maximize long-term shareholders’ returns rather than th…
Deviance, Aspiration, and the Stories We Tell: Reconciling Mass Atrocity and the Criminal Law
The historian Raul Hilberg once observed that we would all be happier if we believed the perpetrators of the Holocaust were crazy. But mass atrocity is never so simple. We may search in Germany, Bosnia, the Congo, or Rwanda for the madman or the devi…
Cost-Benefit Analysis of Financial Regulation: Case Studies and Implications
Some members of Congress, the D.C. Circuit, and the legal academy are promoting a particular, abstract form of cost-benefit analysis for financial regulation: judicially enforced quantification. How would CBA work in practice, if applied to specific,…
Beyond the Indian Commerce Clause
This Article uses unexamined historical sources to argues that the Indian Commerce Clause, open-ended when written, was a minor component of eighteenth-century constitutional thought. T his history provides a more solid foundation for doctrinal principles derided as incoherent, and suggests more cabi…
Rules Against Rulification
The Supreme Court often confronts the choice between bright-line rules and open-ended standards—a point well understood by commentators and the Court itself. Less well understood is a related choice that arises once the Court has opted for a standard over a r…
The Limits of Enumeration
According to a well-known principle of constitutional interpretation here identified as the “internal-limits canon,” the powers of Congress must always be construed as authorizing less legislation than a general police power would. This Article a…
Agency Enforcement of Spending Clause Statutes: A Defense of the Funding Cut-Off
This Article contends that federal agencies ought more frequently to use the threat of cutting off funds to state and local grantees that are not adequately complying with the terms of a grant statute. Scholars tend to offer four arguments to explain—and often to justify—agen…
Criminal Attempts
The intuitive idea that failed attempts to complete crimes are often themselves crimes belies the complexity and confusion surrounding the adjudication of criminal attempts. This Article offers an account of the grounds for the criminalization of att…
Self-Help and the Separation of Powers
Self-help doctrines pervade the law. They regulate a legal subject’s attempts to cure or prevent a perceived wrong by her own action, rather than through a mediated process. In their most acute form, these doctrines allow subjects to take what international lawyers call count…
Illegitimate Borders: Jus Sanguinis Citizenship and the Legal Construction of Family, Race, and Nation
Tracing the racially nativist origins of modern gender-based derivative citizenship law
Legitimacy and Federal Criminal Enforcement Power
The sources of forum disparities in criminal justice reconsidered
The Power to Threaten War
Reframing the war powers debate
The New Minimal Cities
Between 2007 and 2013, twenty-eight urban municipalities declared bankruptcy or entered a state receivership to manage fiscal insolvency. To cut costs and divert revenues to debt payments, these cities have taken dramatic austerity measures—an unwitting experiment wit…
The Separation of Funds and Managers: A Theory of Investment Fund Structure and Regulation
abstract.This Article offers a broad theory of what distinguishes investment funds from ordinary companies, with ramifications for how these funds are understood and regulated. The central claim is that investment funds (i.e., mutual funds, hedge funds, private equity funds, and their …
Leviathan and Interpretive Revolution: The Administrative State, the Judiciary, and the Rise of Legislative History, 1890-1950
A generation ago, it was common and uncontroversial for federal judges to rely upon legislative history when interpreting a statute. But since the 1980s, the textualist movement, led by Justice Scalia, has urged the banishment of legislative history from the judicial system. The result…
The Interpretation-Construction Distinction in Patent Law
The ambiguity of claim language is generally considered to be the most important problem in patent law today. Linguistic ambiguity is believed to cause tremendous uncertainty about patent rights. Scholars and judges have accordingly devoted enormous attention to develop…
The Evolution of Shareholder Voting Rights: Separation of Ownership and Consumption
The nineteenth century saw the standardization and rapid spread of the modern business corporation around the world. Yet those early corporations differed from their contemporary counterparts in important ways. Most obviously, they commonly deviated from the one-share-one…
Ice Cube Bonds: Allocating the Price of Process in Chapter 11 Bankruptcy
In Chrysler’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy, a finding that the debtor was losing $100 million per day justified the hurry-up sale of the company to Fiat. The assertion that a firm is a melting ice cube is frequently offered, soon after a bankruptcy filing, to justify a qui…
Agencies as Litigation Gatekeepers
A central challenge in the modern regulatory state is rationalizing and coordinating multiple, overlapping, and interdependent public and private enforcement mechanisms. To that end, recent years have seen mounting calls to vest administrative agencies with litigation …
Mandatory Sentencing and Racial Disparity: Assessing the Role of Prosecutors and the Effects of Booker
Firearm localism.
This Article argues that Second Amendment doctrine and state preemption laws can and should incorporate longstanding and sensible differences between urban and rural gun use and regulation. Doing so would protect rural gun culture while permitting cities to address urban gun violence.
City Unplanning
122 Yale L.J. 1670 (2013). Generations of scholarship on the political economy of land use have tried to explain a world in which tony suburbs use zoning to keep out development but big cities allow untrammeled growth because of the political influence of developers. But as demand to live in them has…
Rethinking the Federal Eminent Domain Power
122 Yale L.J. 1738 (2013). It is black-letter law that the federal government has the power to take land through eminent domain. This modern understanding, however, is a complete departure from the Constitution’s historical meaning.
From the Founding until the Civil War, the federal government was t…
The Riddle of Rape-by-Deception and the Myth of Sexual Autonomy
122 Yale L.J. 1372 (2013). “Rape-by-deception” is almost universally rejected in American criminal law. But if rape is sex without the victim’s consent—as many courts, state statutes, and scholars say it is—then sex-by-deception ought to be rape, because as courts have held for a hundred years in vir…
Commandeering and Constitutional Change
122 Yale L.J. 1104 (2013). Coming in the midst of the Rehnquist Court’s federalism revolution, Printz v. United States held that federal commandeering of state executive officers is “fundamentally incompatible with our constitutional system of dual sovereignty.” The Printz majority’s discussion of hi…
Parallel Exclusion
122 Yale L.J. 1182 (2013). Scholars and courts have long debated whether and when “parallel pricing”—adoption of the same price by every firm in a market—should be considered a violation of antitrust law. But there has been a comparative neglect of the importance of “parallel exclusion”—conduct, enga…
Text, History, and Tradition: What the Seventh Amendment Can Teach Us About the Second
122 Yale L.J. 852 (2013). In District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. City of Chicago, the Supreme Court made seemingly irreconcilable demands on lower courts: evaluate Second Amendment claims through history, avoid balancing, and retain as much regulation as possible. To date, lower courts hav…
Fudging the Nudge: Information Disclosure and Restaurant Grading
122 Yale L.J. 574 (2012). One of the most promising regulatory currents consists of “targeted” disclosure: mandating simplified information disclosure at the time of decisionmaking to “nudge” parties along. Its poster child is restaurant sanitation grading. In principle, a simple posted letter grade …
The Disappearance of Civil Trial in the United States
122 Yale L.J. 522 (2012). Since the 1930s, the proportion of civil cases concluded at trial has declined from about 20% to below 2% in the federal courts and below 1% in state courts. This Article looks to the history of the civil trial to explain why the trial endured so long and then vanished so ra…
Welfare and Rights Before the Movement: Rights as a Language of the State
122 Yale L.J. 314 (2012).
In conversations about government assistance, rights language often emerges as a danger: when benefits become “rights,” policymakers lose flexibility, taxpayers suffer, and the poor lose their incentive to work. Absent from the discussion is an understanding of how, when, …
Aggregation and Law
122 Yale L.J. 2 (2012). If a plaintiff brings two claims, each with a 0.4 probability of being valid, the plaintiff will usually lose, even if the claims are based on independent events, and thus the probability of at least one of the claims being valid is 0.64. If a plaintiff brings two independent …
A Decision Theory of Statutory Interpretation: Legislative History by the Rules
122 Yale L.J. 70 (2012).
We have a law of civil procedure, criminal procedure, and administrative procedure, but we have no law of legislative procedure. This failure has serious consequences in the field of statutory interpretation. Using simple rules garnered from Congress itself, this Article ar…
Randomized Evaluation in Legal Assistance: What Difference Does Representation (Offer and Actual Use) Make?
121 Yale L.J. 2118 (2012) .
We report the results of the first of a series of randomized evaluations of legal assistance programs. This series of evaluations is designed to measure the effect of both an offer of and the actual use of representation, although it was not possible in the first study …
Regulating Opt-Out: An Economic Theory of Altering Rules
121 Yale L.J. 2032 (2012) . Whenever a rule is contractible, the law must establish separate rules governing how private parties can contract around the default legal treatment. To date, contract theorists have not developed satisfying theories for how to set “altering rules,” the rules that establish…
Voting and Vice: Criminal Disenfranchisement and the Reconstruction Amendments
121 Yale L.J. 1584 (2012) . The Reconstruction Amendments are justly celebrated for transforming millions of recent slaves into voting citizens. Yet this legacy of egalitarian enfranchisement had a flip side. In arguing that voting laws should not discriminate on the basis of morally insignificant statu…
Rights and Votes
121 Yale L.J. 1286. This Article explores the functional similarities, residual differences, and interrelationships between rights and votes, both conceived as tools for protecting minorities (or other vulnerable groups) from the tyranny of majorities (or other dominant social and political actors). …
Dissolving Cities
121 Yale L.J. 1364.
During the twentieth century, thousands of new cities took shape across America. Stucco subdivisions sprawled and law followed, enabling suburbs to adopt independent governments. That story is familiar. But meanwhile, something else was also happening. A smaller but sizable numb…
What Is Tax Discrimination?
121 Yale L.J. 1014 (2012) . Prohibitions of tax discrimination have long appeared in constitutions, tax treaties, trade treaties, and other sources, but despite their ubiquity, little agreement exists as to how such provisions should be interpreted. Some commentators have concluded that tax discrimina…
Burden of Proof
121 Yale L.J. 738 (2012).
The burden of proof is a central feature of all systems of adjudication, yet one that has been subject to little normative analysis. This Article examines how strong evidence should have to be in order to assign liability when the objective is to maximize social welfare. I…
Patent Inflation
121 Yale L.J. 470 (2011) . For more than two decades, the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) and the Federal Circuit have exercised nearly complete institutional control over the patent system. Yet in recent years their stewardship has been widely criticized, largely on the basis of two particular fail…
Outcasting: Enforcement in Domestic and International Law
121 Yale L.J. 252 (2011). This Article offers a new way to understand the enforcement of domestic and international law that we call “outcasting.” Unlike the distinctive method that modern states use to enforce their law, outcasting is nonviolent: it does not rely on bureaucratic organizations, such …
Prods and Pleas: Limited Government in an Era of Unlimited Harm
121 Yale L.J. 350 (2011).
Not just a system of checks and balances ideally tuned to constrain collective political action, the constitutional division of authority also may be seen as a system of “prods and pleas” in which distinct governmental branches and actors can push each other to entertai…
Misalignments in Tort Law
121 Yale L.J. 82 (2011). In negligence law, the risks taken into account by courts when setting the standard of care are the same risks considered when imposing liability and awarding damages. I call this the “alignment principle.” One objective of this Article is to expose exceptions to the alignment p…
The Architecture of Jurisprudence
121 Yale L.J. 2 (2011). Contemporary jurisprudence has been dominated by an unhelpful interest in taxonomy. A conventional wisdom has grown up around these projects. This Article, the first in a three-part series, identifies two dominant claims of this conventional wisdom in jurisprudence—one substantiv…
Intersystemic Statutory Interpretation: Methodology as “Law” and the Erie Doctrine
120 Yale L.J. 1898 (2011).
Do the Erie Doctrine and its “reverse-Erie” mirror require state and federal courts to apply one another’s statutory interpretation methodologies when they interpret one another’s statutes? Surprisingly, the courts have no consistent answer to this question—even though s…
120 Yale L.J. 1898 (2011).
The Inducement Standard of Patentability
120 Yale L.J. 1590 (2011).
In Graham v. John Deere Co. , the Supreme Court explained that patent law’s nonobviousness doctrine is meant to restrict the award of patents to only “those inventions which would not be disclosed or devised but for the inducement of a patent.” This Article argues that th…
Taxation and Liquidity
120 Yale L.J. 1682 (2011).
One of the principal determinants of an asset’s return is its liquidity—the ease with which the asset can be bought and sold. Liquid assets yield a lower return than do otherwise comparable illiquid assets. This Article demonstrates that an income tax alters the tradeoff…
From Colorblindness to Antibalkanization: An Emerging Ground of Decision in Race Equality Cases
120 Yale L.J. 1278 (2011).
For decades, the Supreme Court has sharply divided in equal protection race discrimination cases. As commonly described, the Justices disagree about whether the Equal Protection Clause is properly interpreted through a colorblind anticlassification principle concerned wi…
Associational Speech
120 Yale L.J. 978 (2011).
This Article explores the relationship between the First Amendment right of free speech and the nontextual First Amendment right of freedom of association. The Article provides important and new insights into this area of law, drawing upon recent scholarship to urge a sub…
Allocating Power Within Agencies
120 Yale L.J. 1032 (2011).
Standard questions in the theory of administrative law involve the allocation of power among legislatures, courts, the President, and various types of agencies. These questions are often heavily informed by normative commitments to particular allocations of governmental …
Remedies On and Off Contract
120 Yale L.J. 690 (2011).
Liberal allowance of rescission followed by restitution has, for centuries, unsettled legal authorities who fear it as a threat to commercial order or other normative values. Responding to these fears, authorities have limited the ease with which rescission may be elected…
Discrimination by Comparison
120 Yale L.J. 728 (2011).
Contemporary discrimination law is in crisis, both methodologically and conceptually. The crisis arises in large part from the judiciary’s dependence on comparators—those who are like a discrimination claimant but for the protected characteristic—as a favored heuristic fo…
The One and Only Substantive Due Process Clause
120 Yale L.J. 408 (2010).
The nature and scope of the rights protected by the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments are among the most debated topics in all of constitutional law. At the core of this debate is the question of whether these clauses should be understood to prote…
Withdrawing from International Custom
120 Yale L.J. 202 (2010).
Treaties are negotiated, usually written down, and often subject to cumbersome domestic ratification processes. Nonetheless, nations often have the right to withdraw unilaterally from them. By contrast, the conventional wisdom is that nations never have the legal right to…
Legislative Rules, Nonlegislative Rules, and the Perils of the Short Cut
120 Yale L.J. 276 (2010).
Courts have long struggled to distinguish legislative rules, which are designed to have binding legal effect and must go through the rulemaking procedure known as notice and comment, from nonlegislative rules, which are not meant to have binding legal effect and are exemp…
Patent Law and the Two Cultures
120 Yale L.J. 2 (2010).
A half-century ago, author and physicist C.P. Snow warned of a “gulf of mutual incomprehension” between the liberal arts and sciences. Snow’s “Two Cultures” thesis is particularly relevant to patent law, a realm where law and science intersect. Drawing on Snow’s framework, …
Taking Exit Rights Seriously: Why Governance and Fee Litigation Don’t Work in Mutual Funds
120 Yale L.J. 84 (2010).
Unlike shareholders of ordinary companies, mutual fund shareholders do not sell their shares—they redeem them from the issuing funds for cash. We argue that this unique form of exit almost completely eliminates mutual fund investors’ incentives to use voting, boards, and f…
The States as Laboratories of Statutory Interpretation: Methodological Consensus and the New Modified Textualism
119 Yale L.J. 1750 (2010).
This Article offers the first close study of statutory interpretation in several state courts of last resort. While academics have spent the past decade speculating about the “death of textualism,” the utility of legislated rules of interpretation, and the capacity of ju…
Federal Administration and Administrative Law in the Gilded Age
119 Yale L.J. 1362 (2010).
The dominant story of America’s so-called “Gilded Age” describes an era of private excess and public corruption. In a rapidly industrializing society, private capital, in league with venal politicians, ran roughshod over a national state apparatus incapable of responding…
Contract, Race, and Freedom of Labor in the Constitutional Law of "Involuntary Servitude"
119 Yale L.J. 1474 (2010).
The Supreme Court has yet to adopt and apply a standard for assessing labor rights claims under the Involuntary Servitude Clause. This Article suggests that one may be found in the leading decision of Pollock v. Williams (1944), which contains the Court’s most thorough d…
The Politics of Nature: Climate Change, Environmental Law, and Democracy
119 Yale L.J. 1122 (2010).
Legal scholars’ discussions of climate change assume that the issue is one mainly of engineering incentives, and that “environmental values” are too weak, vague, or both to spur political action to address the emerging crisis. This Article gives reason to believe otherwi…
Strategic Vagueness in Contract Design: The Case of Corporate Acquisitions
119 Yale L.J. 848 (2010).
The unprecedented and unanticipated economic and financial shocks of the past couple of years have led parties to look for contractual escapes from deals. As the current crisis works its way through our economic system, however, attention will be shifted from the collaps…
Antibankruptcy
119 Yale L.J. 648 (2010).
In large Chapter 11 cases, the prototypical creditor is no longer a small player holding a claim much like everyone else’s, but rather a distressed debt professional advancing her own agenda. Secured creditors are more pervasive and enjoy much more control than they had e…
Fourth Amendment Seizures of Computer Data
119 Yale L.J. 700 (2010).
What does it mean to “seize” computer data for Fourth Amendment purposes? Does copying data amount to a seizure, and if so, when? This Article argues that copying data “seizes” it under the Fourth Amendment when copying occurs without human observation and interrupts the …
Property as Process: How Innovation Markets Select Innovation Regimes
119 Yale L.J. 384 (2009).
It is commonly asserted that innovation markets suffer from excessive intellectual property protections, which in turn stifle output. But empirical inquiries can neither confirm nor deny this assertion. Under the agnostic assumption that we cannot assess directly whether …
The President and Immigration Law
119 Yale L.J. 458 (2009).
The plenary power doctrine sharply limits the judiciary’s power to police immigration regulation—a fact that has preoccupied immigration law scholars for decades. But scholars’ persistent focus on the distribution of power between the courts and the political branches has…
Government in Opposition
119 Yale L.J. 548 (2009).
In the past generation, in countries in all parts of the world, using all different forms of constitutional government, a new form of separation of powers has emerged in greater numbers, what this Article calls “government in opposition.” After democratic elections are …
Presidential Power over International Law: Restoring the Balance
119 Yale L.J. 140 (2009).
The vast majority of U.S. international agreements today are made by the President acting alone. Little noticed and rarely discussed, the agreements are concluded in a process almost completely hidden from outside view. This state of affairs is the result of a longterm tr…
Proposing a Place for Politics in Arbitrary and Capricious Review
119 Yale L.J. 2 (2009).
Current conceptions of “arbitrary and capricious” review focus on whether agencies have adequately explained their decisions in statutory, factual, scientific, or otherwise technocratic terms. Courts, agencies, and scholars alike, accordingly, generally have accepted the no…
In Defense of Property
118 Yale L.J. 1022 (2009).
This Article responds to an emerging view, in scholarship and popular society, that it is normatively undesirable to employ property law as a means of protecting indigenous cultural heritage. Recent critiques suggest that propertizing culture impedes the free flow of i…
Uncooperative Federalism
118 Yale L.J. 1256 (2009).
This Essay addresses a gap in the federalism literature. Scholars have offered two distinct visions of federal-state relations. The first depicts states as rivals and challengers to the federal government, roles they play by virtue of being autonomous policymakers outsid…
The Classic Rule of Faith and Credit
118 Yale L.J. 1584 (2009).
Since the late nineteenth century, orthodox doctrine under the Constitution’s Full Faith and Credit Clause has presumed that the interpretation of that Clause set forth in Justice Joseph Story’s 1833 Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States was essentially…
The Case for Symmetry in Creditors' Rights
118 Yale L.J. 806 (2009).
Using an original framework for evaluating bankruptcy rules, this Article casts doubt on the efficiency of legal arrangements that give some creditors an absolute advantage over others in the division of a debtor’s assets. Such arrangements, which I classify as asymmetr…
Clearing the Smoke from Philip Morris v. Williams: The Past, Present, and Future of Punitive Damages
118 Yale L.J. 392 (2008).
In Philip Morris USA v. Williams , the Supreme Court held that the Constitution does not permit the imposition of punitive damages to punish a defendant for harm caused to third parties. This Article critiques the reasoning, but seeks ultimately to vindicate the result, …
Learning Through Policy Variation
118 Yale L.J. 480 (2008).
Rationalist analysis of policymaking, exemplified by cost-benefit analysis, ignores the variance in outcomes associated with policies and seeks to maximize expected outcomes. Burkeans, by contrast, view policy outcome uncertainty negatively. The Burkean approach is echo…
Suspension as an Emergency Power
118 Yale L.J. 600 (2009).
As the war on terrorism continues, and along with it a heated debate over the scope of executive authority in times of national emergency, one important question deserves careful attention: how much power may Congress vest in the executive to address the crisis at hand …
The Ideology of Authorship Revisited: Authors, Markets, and Liberal Values in Early American Copyright
118 Yale L.J. 186 (2008).
The concept of the author is deemed to be central to copyright law. An important strand of copyright scholarship explores how the development of modern copyright law was intertwined with the rise of a new ideology of authorship as an individualist act of creation ex nihilo…
The Price of Public Action: Constitutional Doctrine and the Judicial Manipulation of Legislative Enactment Costs
118 Yale L.J. 2 (2008).
This Article argues that courts can, and often should, implement constitutional guarantees by crafting doctrines that raise the costs to government decisionmakers of enacting constitutionally problematic policies. This indirect approach may implement a kind of implicit balan…
Normative Canons in the Review of Administrative Policymaking
118 Yale L.J. 64 (2008).
Who should ensure that statutes are interpreted to reflect background norms left unaddressed by Congress—norms like respect for the rights of regulated parties, protection of the interests of states and Native American tribes, avoidance of government bias, and the separa…
Administration and "The Democracy": Administrative Law from Jackson to Lincoln, 1829-1861
117 Yale L.J. 1568 (2008).
Jacksonian America was a country in rapid transition. Intensified sectional divisions, exponential increases in urbanization and immigration, the rise of factory production, and repeated cycles of economic boom and bust helped to fuel an anxious desire for political refor…
Treaties' End: The Past, Present, and Future of International Lawmaking in the United States
117 Yale L.J. 1236 (2008).
Nearly every international agreement that is made through the Treaty Clause should be approved by both houses of Congress as a congressional-executive agreement instead. In making this case, this Article examines U.S. international lawmaking through empirical, comparative…
Just Semantics: The Lost Readings of the Americans with Disabilities Act
117 Yale L.J. 992 (2008).
Disability rights advocates and commentators agree that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has veered far off course from the Act’s mandate of protecting people with actual or perceived disabilities from discrimination. They likewise agree that the fault lies in the…
Race and Democratic Contestation
117 Yale L.J. 734 (2008).
As the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) passes its fortieth anniversary and faces upcoming constitutional challenges to its recent renewal, a growing number of liberals and conservatives, once united in support, now share deep reservations about it. This Article argues that…
The Access to Knowledge Mobilization and the New Politics of Intellectual Property
117 Yale L.J. 804 (2008).
Intellectual property law was once an arcane subject. Today it is at the center of some of the most highly charged political contests of our time. In recent years, college students, subsistence farmers, AIDS activists, genomic scientists, and free-software programmers have…
Antislavery Courts and the Dawn of International Human Rights Law
117 Yale L.J. 550 (2008).
Between 1817 and 1871, bilateral treaties between Britain and several other countries (eventually including the United States) led to the establishment of international courts for the suppression of the slave trade. Though all but forgotten today, these antislavery courts …
Consumerism Versus Producerism: A Study in Comparative Law
117 Yale L.J. 340 (2007).
The spread of American-style “consumerism” is a burning global issue today. The most visible symbols of American consumerism, large enterprises like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, attract vitriolic attacks in many parts of the world. Political conflict in Europe (and elsewhere) …
The Constitution Outside the Constitution
117 Yale L.J. 408 (2007).
Countries lacking a single canonical text define the “constitution” to include all laws that perform the constitutive functions of creating governmental institutions and conferring rights on individuals. The British Constitution, for example, includes a variety of constitu…
The Promise and Pitfalls of the New Voting Rights Act
117 Yale L.J. 174 (2007).
In the summer of 2006, Congress reauthorized the expiring provisions of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) with a unanimous vote in the Senate and with limited opposition in the House of Representatives. The veneer of bipartisanship that outsiders perceived in the final vote glos…
Contracting for Cooperation in Recovery
117 Yale L.J. 2 (2007).
There is a longstanding debate about whether courts should enforce contract terms purporting to limit the parties’ liability for fraud. It is less-often noticed that many contracts are designed to incorporate fraud liability by requiring one party to make representations abo…
Intellectual Property as Property: Delineating Entitlements in Information
This Article proposes that intellectual property’s close relationship to property stems from the role that information costs play in the delineation and enforcement of exclusion rights. As theorists have emphasized, the nonrivalness of information causes exclusive rights to be more costly in terms o…
Reluctant Nationalists: Federal Administration and Administrative Law in the Republican Era, 1801-1829
In 1801 the Jeffersonian Republicans took charge of Congress, the presidency, and the national administration, determined to roll back the state-building excesses of their Federalist predecessors. In this effort they were partially successful. But the tide of history and the demands of a growing nat…
Property and Half-Torts
116 Yale L.J. 1400 (2007)
The idea that a tort can be split analytically into two parts—risk and harm—underlies a great deal of torts scholarship. Yet the notion has been all but ignored by property scholars employing Calabresi and Melamed’s famous entitlement framework. Thus, in discussing an “ent…
Risk Aversion and Rights Accretion in Intellectual Property Law
116 Yale L.J. 882 (2007)
Intellectual property’s road to hell is paved with good intentions. Because liability is difficult to predict and the consequences of infringement are dire, risk-averse intellectual property users often seek a license when none is needed. Yet because the existence ( vel non )…
The Constitutional Foundations of Chenery
116 Yale L.J. 952 (2007)
The Supreme Court regularly upholds federal legislation on grounds other than those stated by Congress. Likewise, an appellate court may affirm a lower court judgment even if the lower court’s opinion expressed the wrong reasons for it. Not so in the case of judicial review…
Chevron as a Voting Rule
116 Yale L.J. 676 (2007) In Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. , the Supreme Court created a new framework for judicial deference to agency interpretations of law: courts should defer to an agency interpretation unless the relevant statute is clear or the agency interpret…
The Corporate Origins of Judicial Review
116 Yale L.J. 502 (2006) This Article argues that the origins of judicial review lie in corporate law. Diverging from standard historical accounts that locate the origins in theories of fundamental law or in the American structure of government, the Article argues that judicial review was the continu…
Unpacking the Household: Informal Property Rights Around the Hearth
As Aristotle recognized in The Politics , the household is an indispensable building block of social, economic, and political life. A liberal society grants its citizens far wider berth to arrange their households than to choose their familial and marital relationships. Legal commentators, however, h…
Education, Equality, and National Citizenship
116 Yale L.J. 330 (2006) For disadvantaged children in substandard schools, the recent success of educational adequacy lawsuits in state courts is a welcome development. But the potential of this legal strategy to advance a national goal of equal educational opportunity is limited by a sobering and l…
How To Remove a Federal Judge
116 Yale L.J. 72 (2006) Most everyone assumes that impeachment is the only means of removing federal judges and that the Constitution's grant of good-behavior tenure is an implicit reference to impeachment. This Article challenges that conventional wisdom. Using evidence from England, the colonies, a…
Criminal Law Comes Home
116 Yale L.J. 2 (2006) Though traditionally criminal law did not reach into the home to punish domestic violence, today such intervention in the home is well accepted and steadily growing. Because we all welcome that remedial development, we have taken little notice of the legal innovations in misd…
Beyond Lawrence : Metaprivacy and Punishment
115 Yale L.J. 1862 (2006) Lawrence v. Texas remains, after three years of precedential life, an opinion in search of a principle. It is both libertarian–Randy Barnett has called it the constitutionalization of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty –and communitarian–William Eskridge has described it as the ga…
Good Governance at the Supranational Scale: Globalizing Administrative Law
115 Yale L.J. 1490 (2006) This Article examines the tension between the demonstrable need for structured international cooperation in a world of interdependence and the political strain that arises whenever policymaking authority is lodged in global institutions. It argues that the tools of administr…
Law's Migration: American Exceptionalism, Silent Dialogues, and Federalism's Multiple Ports of Entry
115 Yale L.J. 1564 (2006) Legal theorists are engaged in understanding the legitimacy of techniques by which principles of rights-holding travel across borders. Sovereigntists in the United States object to that migration. The history of both protest about and the incorporation of "foreign" law provi…
Recovering American Administrative Law: Federalist Foundations, 1787-1801
115 Yale L.J. 1256 (2006) By scholarly convention, federal administrative law begins in the United States in 1887 with the establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Before that time the national government is perceived as a state of courts and parties in which federal administration was mi…
Income Tax Discrimination and the Political and Economic Integration of Europe
115 Yale L.J. 1186 (2006) In recent years, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has invalidated many income tax law provisions of European Union (EU) member states as violating European constitutional treaty guarantees of freedom of movement for goods, services, persons, and capital. These decisions h…
Managing Transitional Moments in Criminal Cases
115 Yale L.J. 922 (2006) As long as some courts review the work of others, there will be situations in which governing precedent shifts during the interval between an initial decision and the underlying dispute's ultimate resolution. Although such "transitional moments" follow many appellate court de…
Immoral Purposes: Marriage and the Genus of Illicit Sex
115 Yale L.J. 756 (2006) In Lawrence v. Texas , the Supreme Court situates its opinion within the history of laws banning sodomy. Lawrence , however, is also part of another historical narrative: the history of attempts by federal lawmakers and judges to define the relationships among the genus of illi…
Anticipating Litigation in Contract Design
115 Yale L.J. 814 (2006) Contract theory does not address the question of how parties design contracts under the existing adversarial system, which relies on the parties to establish relevant facts indirectly by the use of evidentiary proxies. In this Article, we advance a theory of contract design i…
The Constitutional Status of Tort Law: Due Process and the Right to a Law for the Redress of Wrongs
115 Yale L.J. 524 (2005) In our legal system, redressing private wrongs has tended to be the business of tort law, itself traditionally a branch of the common law. But do individuals have a "vested interest" in law that redresses wrongs? If so, do state and federal governments have a constitutional d…
Jurisdictional Competition for Trust Funds: An Empirical Analysis of Perpetuities and Taxes
115 Yale L.J. 356 (2005) This Article presents the first empirical study of the domestic jurisdictional competition for trust funds. To allow donors to exploit a loophole in the federal estate tax, since 1986 a host of states have abolished the Rule Against Perpetuities as applied to interests in tru…
Rethinking Civil Rights Lawyering and Politics in the Era Before Brown
115 Yale L.J. 256 (2005) This Article argues that scholarly accounts of civil rights lawyering and politics have emphasized, incorrectly, a narrative that begins with Plessy v. Ferguson and ends with Brown v. Board of Education . That traditional narrative has relied on a legal liberal view of civil r…
Fixing Freezeouts
115 Yale L.J. 2 (2005) Freezeout transactions, in which a controlling shareholder buys out the minority shareholders, have occurred more frequently since the stock market downturn of 2000 and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. While freezeouts were historically executed as statutory mergers, recent Dela…
The City and the Poet
114 Yale L.J. 1835 (2005) Although it is a contemporary of law and economics, law and literature has never secured widespread uptake in the legal academy. In this Article, Professor Yoshino explains the relative anemia of the discipline and prescribes a cure. Law has an incentive to distance itself f…
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Making of Quack Corporate Governance
114 Yale L.J. 1521 (2005) This Article provides an evaluation of the substantive corporate governance mandates of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002 that is informed by the relevant empirical accounting and finance literature, and of the political dynamics that produced the mandates. The empirical …
Questioning the Trust Law Duty of Loyalty: Sole Interest or Best Interest?
114 Yale L.J. 929 (2005) The duty of loyalty requires a trustee to administer the trust solely in the interest of the beneficiaries. Any transaction in which the trustee has an actual or potential interest violates the sole interest rule, no matter how beneficial the transaction to the beneficiaries.…
On the Alienability of Legal Claims
114 Yale L.J. 697 (2005) Courts have become increasingly skeptical of rules restricting plaintiffs' ability to sell legal claims, while legal commentators have argued that markets for claims would be economically beneficial, moving claims to those who can prosecute them most efficiently. Claim sales …
The Right To Destroy
114 Yale L.J. 781 (2005) Do you have the right to destroy that which is yours? This Article addresses that fundamental question. In contested cases, courts are becoming increasingly hostile to owners' efforts to destroy their own valuable property. This sentiment has been echoed in the legal academy,…
The Defined Contribution Paradigm
114 Yale L.J. 451 (2004) Pension cognoscenti have frequently remarked on the stagnation of defined benefit pensions and the concomitant rise of defined contribution plans. This Article suggests that over the last generation something more fundamental, which can justly be called a paradigm shift, has…
The Federalist Dimension of Regulatory Takings Jurisprudence
114 Yale L.J. 203 (2004) Federalism concerns, underappreciated in the takings literature, play an important role in shaping the Supreme Court's takings jurisprudence. The Takings Clause does not guarantee any particular property rights; instead, the Clause protects primarily against change in backgro…
The Future of Disability Law
114 Yale L.J. 1 (2004) Since its enactment in 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has dominated discussions of disability law in the legal academy. While the ADA's achievements must be celebrated, the statute's limitations have become increasingly apparent. In particular, the statute appe…
The Eleventh Amendment and the Reading of Precise Constitutional Texts
113 Yale L.J. 1663 (2004) INTRODUCTION In recent years, the Supreme Court has frequently observed that most statutes involve compromise. In particular, when Congress enacts a clear and precise statutory text--one that articulates not only a set of relevant aims but also the specific means of their …
The Paradox of Parliamentary Supremacy: Delegation, Democracy, and Dictatorship in Germany and France, 1920s-1950s
113 Yale L.J. 1341 (2004) The struggle to define the role of the legislature in the modern administrative state has been central to constitutional politics in Western countries. That struggle was especially intense in Germany and France from the 1920s to the 1950s. Contrary to claims of certain inte…
Contract and Collaboration
113 Yale L.J. 1417 (2004) Promises and contracts establish relations among the persons who engage them, and these relations lie at the center of persons' moral and legal experience of one another. But the most prominent accounts of these practices nevertheless remain firmly individualistic, seeking …
The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity Versus Liberty
113 Yale L.J. 1151 (2004) Privacy advocates often like to claim that all modern societies feel the same intuitive need to protect privacy. Yet it is clear that intuitive sensibilities about privacy differ from society to society, even as between the closely kindred societies of the United States and …
The Integration of Tax and Spending Programs
113 Yale L.J. 955 (2004) This Article provides a theory for deciding when a spending program should be implemented through the tax system. The decision is traditionally thought to be based on considerations of tax policy. The most common theories are the comprehensive tax base theory and the tax expe…
Offering an Invisible Hand: The Rise of the Personal Choice Model for Rationing Public Benefits
113 Yale L.J. 815 (2004) The 1996 welfare law passed amidst promises to reduce welfare rolls without abandoning needy families. A strong economy, state work support programs, and the efforts of millions of low-income parents brought substantial reductions in the ranks of those eligible for cash assis…
Contract Theory and the Limits of Contract Law
113 Yale L.J. 541 (2003) This Article sets out a normative theory to guide decisionmakers in the regulation of contracts between firms. Commercial law for centuries has drawn a distinction between mercantile contracts and others, but modern scholars have not systematically pursued the normative impli…
Punitive Damages as Societal Damages
113 Yale L.J. 347 (2003) Jury awards of "classwide" punitive damages provide windfalls to individual plaintiffs, particularly in products liability, fraud, civil rights, and employment discrimination cases. This suggests a new angle from which to approach the ongoing punitive damages debate. Under cu…
How To Fix Wall Street: A Voucher Financing Proposal for Securities Intermediaries
113 Yale L.J. 269 (2003) Securities market intermediaries reduce the collective action problem facing investors in the capital markets. Analysts provide securities research. Proxy advisory firms assist investors in determining how to vote their shares. Even shareholders bringing proxy contests can be…
An Old Judicial Role for a New Litigation Era
113 Yale L.J. 27 (2003) Because litigation has changed so dramatically in the last half century, scholars tend to view contemporary civil procedure as raising new problems that require new solutions. We have overlooked that many of these problems can be explained, and even resolved, using an age-old …
Legislative Constitutionalism and Section Five Power: Policentric Interpretation of the Family and Medical Leave Act
112 Yale L.J. 1943 (2003) The Court is now striking down a variety of federal civil rights statutes as beyond Congress's power under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment. In imposing limits on federal authority to enact civil rights laws, the Court has invoked a particular understanding of separatio…
The Sanitized Workplace
112 Yale L.J. 2061 (2003) One of American society's most cherished beliefs is that the workplace is, or should be, asexual. This ethic is a legacy of our historic commitment to a conception of organizational rationality that treats sexuality as irrational and unproductive--a conception that had come …
What Kind of Immunity? Federal Officers, State Criminal Law, and the Supremacy Clause
112 Yale L.J. 1943 (2003) When, if ever, may a State prosecute a federal officer for violating state criminal law while discharging his federal duties? Over the past decade, developments in the doctrines associated with "federalism" have redefined the constitutional status of federal attempts to regu…
In the Shadow of Marriage: Single Women and the Legal Construction of the Family and the State
112 Yale L.J. 1641 (2003) This Article argues that the law has constructed marriage as an institution capable of regulating the rights and responsibilities of even unmarried women. In various ways, the law has constructed the rights of certain groups of unmarried women "in the shadow of marriage": Th…
Conspiracy Theory
112 Yale L.J. 1307 (2003) Over one-quarter of all federal criminal prosecutions and a large number of state cases involve prosecutions for conspiracy. Yet, the major scholarly articles and the bulk of prominent jurists have roundly condemned the doctrine. This Article offers a functional justificatio…
Piercing the Veil
112 Yale L.J. 1399 (2003) Human rights law has a problem with religion. In a postmodern world in which the nation-state has been deconstructed and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century notions of unmediated national sovereignty have been properly put to rest, religion--and its attendant category, cultur…
Chaos and Rules: Should Responses to Violent Crises Always Be Constitutional?
112 Yale L.J. 1011 (2003) This Article suggests that legal models that have been traditionally invoked in the context of fashioning responses to emergencies may not always be adequate. Rather, there may be circumstances when the appropriate method of tackling grave threats entails going outside the l…
Why Above-Cost Price Cuts To Drive Out Entrants Are Not Predatory--and the Implications for Defining Costs and Market Power
112 Yale L.J. 681 (2003) Recently, European and U.S. officials have made surprising moves toward restricting firms from using above-cost price cuts to drive out entrants. This Article argues that these legal developments likely reflect the fact that scholarly critiques of cost-based tests of predator…
Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm
112 Yale L.J. 369 (2002) For decades our common understanding of the organization of economic production has been that individuals order their productive activities in one of two ways: either as employees in firms, following the directions of managers, or as individuals in markets, following price si…
Are Police Free To Disregard Miranda?
112 Yale L.J. 447 (2002) This Article contends that the common understanding of Miranda as a direct restraint on custodial interrogation by police is mistaken. Instead, Miranda, like the privilege against compulsory self-incrimination that serves as its constitutional foundation, is a rule of admissi…
The Birth of an Academic Obsession: The History of the Countermajoritarian Difficulty, Part Five
112 Yale L.J. 153 (2002) How is it that the countermajoritarian difficulty became the central frame for constitutional theory for the last fifty years? That is the question taken up in this, the last installment of The History of the Countermajoritarian Difficulty. The piece explains that the counter…
The Freedom of Imagination: Copyright's Constitutionality
112 Yale L.J. 1 (2002) In some parts of the world, you can go to jail for reciting a poem in public without permission from state-licensed authorities. Where is this true? One place is the United States of America. Copyright law is a kind of giant First Amendment duty-free zone. It flouts basic fr…
The Political Economy of School Choice
111 Yale L.J. 2043 (2002) This Article examines the political economy of school choice and focuses on the role of suburbanites. This group has re- ceived little attention in the commentary but is probably the most important and powerful stakeholder in choice debates. Suburbanites generally do not sup…
Do Human Rights Treaties Make a Difference?
111 Yale L.J. 1870 (2002) Do countries comply with the requirements of human rights treaties that they join? Are these treaties effective in chan- ging changing states' behavior for the better? This Article addresses these questions through a large-scale quan- titative analysis of the relationship be…
The Law and Economics of Reverse Engineering
111 Yale L.J. 1575 (2002) Reverse engineering has a long history as an accepted practice. What it means, broadly speaking, is the process of extracting know-how or knowledge from a human-made artifact. Lawyers and economists have endorsed reverse engineering as an appropriate way to obtain such info…
The Storrs Lectures: Liberals and Romantics at War: The Problem of Collective Guilt
111 Yale L.J. 1499 (2002) Somehow we in the West thought the age of war was behind us. After nuking Hiroshima, after napalming Vietnam, we had only distaste for the idea and the practice of war. The thought of dying for a noble cause, the pursuit of honor in the name of patria, brotherhood in arms--n…
Framing Transactions in Constitutional Law
111 Yale L.J. 1311 (2002) Common-law rules and adjudication are typically structured around discrete interactions between strangers. The unit of legal analysis, or "transaction," is intuitively defined by the discontinuous event that disrupted the otherwise unrelated lives of the parties; and the foc…
Waging War, Deciding Guilt: Trying the Military Tribunals
111 Yale L.J. 1259 (2002) In this Essay, we argue that President Bush's recent Military Order, which directs his Defense Department to detain any members of an ill-defined class of individuals, potentially indefinitely, and to try them in military tribunals, jeopardizes the separation of powers today…
The Anti-Antidiscrimination Agenda
111 Yale L.J. 1141 (2002) For a brief historical moment, a shadow overhung constitutional law--the shadow of Bush v. Gore. Many people consider the five-Justice majority opinion in that case to have been, legally speaking, a kind of joke. Obviously, those who hold this view wonder whether that case …
Architecture as Crime Control
111 Yale L.J. 1039 (2002) Building on work in architectural theory, Professor Katyal demonstrates how attention to cities, neighborhoods, and individual buildings can reduce criminal activity. The field of cyberlaw has been transformed by the insight that architecture can regulate behavior in cybersp…
111 Yale L.J. 769 (2002) In this article, Professor Yoshino considers how the gay civil rights movement might enright the American civil rights paradigm, which he takes to be predicated on the paradigm classifications of race and sex. He posits that gays may be able to contribute a more robust theory…
111 Yale L.J. 547 (2001) Givings-government acts that enhance property value-are omnipresent. Yet they have received scant scholarly attention and no consistent doctrinal or theoretical treatment. Although givings and takings are mirror images of one another and are of equal practical and theoretical…
Corporations and Human Rights: A Theory of Legal Responsibility
111 Yale L.J. 443 (2001) The path of international law over the last century has been one of increasing both the breadth and the depth of its coverage. Its breadth has grown through the addition of new areas for regulation, whether the environment, telecommunications, health, or human rights; and its…
The Executive Power over Foreign Affairs
111 Yale L.J. 231 (2001) This Article presents a comprehensive textual framework for the allocation of the foreign affairs powers of the United States government. The authors argue that modern scholarship has too hastily given up on the Constitution's text and too quickly concluded that the Constitut…
A Dilution Mechanism for Valuing Corporations in Bankruptcy
111 Yale L.J. 83 (2001) This Article proposes a new mechanism for valuing firms in bankruptcy. Under the "senior dilution" mechanism, a court would dilute the reorganized stock issued to senior claimants by issuing additional shares to junior claimants until there was no excess demand for the stock a…
The Rise of Dispersed Ownership The Roles of Law and the State in the Separation of Ownership and Control
111 Yale L.J. 1 (2001) Deep and liquid securities markets appear to be an exception to a worldwide pattern in which concentrated ownership dominates dispersed ownership. Recent commentary has argued that a dispersed shareholder base is unlikely to develop in civil-law countries and transitional econo…
Currency Policies and Legal Development in Colonial New England
110 Yale L.J. 1303 (2001) This Article presents a new interpretation of the relation of law to economic development in colonial New England. Prior legal historical scholarship has focused almost exclusively on judicial decisionmaking, emphasizing judges' role in adapting the law in some optimal way …
Judicial Fact-Finding and Sentence Enhancements in a World of Guilty Pleas
110 Yale L.J. 1097 (2001) Last June, in Apprendi v. New Jersey , the Supreme Court held that any fact that increases a defendant's statutory maximum sentence must be proved to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. This rule, like most of criminal procedure law and scholarship, rests on the assumption that…
Federal Regulation of State Court Procedures
110 Yale L.J. 947 (2001) May Congress regulate the procedures by which state courts adjudicate claims arising under state law? Recently, Congress not only has considered several bills that would do so, but has enacted a few of them. This Article concludes that such laws exceed Congress's constitution…
Rethinking the Puzzle of Escalating Penalties for Repeat Offenders
110 Yale L.J. 733 (2001) The general principle of escalating penalties based on offense history is so widely accepted that it strikes most people as simple common sense. This principle, however, tests the explanatory limits of economics. Contrary to the assumptions in the existing literature, probabi…
The Liberal Commons
110 Yale L.J. 549 (2001) Must we choose between the benefits of cooperative use of scarce resources and our liberal commitments to autonomy and exit? No. Well-tailored law can mediate between community and liberty, between commons and private property. Our theory of the liberal commons provides a fra…
The Essential Role of Organizational Law
110 Yale L.J. 387 (2000) In every developed market economy, the law provides for a set of standard-form legal entities. In the United States, these entities include, among others, the business corporation, the cooperative corporation, the nonprofit corporation, the municipal corporation, the limited …
A Liberal Theory of Social Welfare: Fairness, Utility, and the Pareto Principle
110 Yale L.J. 173 (2000) Amartya Sen shows how liberal rights can produce outcomes that everyone would prefer to avoid, thereby violating the Pareto principle. Similarly, Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell identify potential conflicts between the Pareto principle and notions of "fairness," which give we…
Optimal Standardization in the Law of Property: The Numerus Clausus Principle
110 Yale L.J. 1 (2000) In all postfeudal legal systems, the basic ways of owning property are limited in number and standardized, in the sense that courts will enforce as property only interests that are built from a list of recognized forms. In the common law, this principle has no name and is invok…
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How to Write a Law Review Article
One of the most valuable aspects of writing a law review is the opportunity to write and submit an article for publishing. Writing a law review article, or a note that explores a unique legal problem provides you with hands-on experience to increase your likelihood of being chosen for your law review’s administrative panel, as well as to develop your Resume if it is accepted.
Unfortunately, the writing process may be time-consuming and laborious. It might be difficult to choose and create a relevant and interesting topic, do a preliminary check, update your legal study, and verify sources and references.
Before starting a law review article, it is important to understand what it means.
What is a law review article?
Law reviews are research articles that are produced by law students in collaboration with faculty personnel. They include long articles and brief notes from academics and attorneys, as well as student remarks, observations, and changes in the law. Law journal articles frequently focus on emerging or developing areas of legislation and can provide more critical analysis than a law encyclopedia or ALR item.
Typically, students begin the distribution of journals by publishing papers written by legal instructors and researchers. In the areas covered in the evaluations, the law students provide references, observations, and suggestions.
Choosing a Topic/Theme
Choosing a current and engaging theme is the first stage of drafting a unique law review article. It’s important to start filtering through potential article ideas as soon as you’ve been accepted to law review and to understand how to distinguish the best topics.
Current legal trends might help you identify a problem or significant recent ruling that could be the subject of a journal article or law review. Cases, legislation, legal writing process, and journals, as well as a non-legal resource of material, are all available in numerous law archives and can help you focus your research on a subject.
Current legal trends might assist you in locating a problem or a significant recent ruling. You may search via topics ranging from bankruptcies and licensing to trade and employment and financial regulatory in nearly every major legal database, such as Westlaw or Harvard law review.
Outlining your Article
The proportion of chapters, sections, and subcategories will vary depending on how your topic develops logically. Case notes, which are generally in sequential order, can be summarized as follows:
- Introduction – 2-3 pages, stating the issue and why it is essential.
- Background – This section explains the problem’s context. It should contain all of the materials you’ll need for your study, such as cases, law review articles, and so on. Integrate instances and theory as much as possible. To help the reader navigate this content, use descriptive headers.
- The Main Case – This is where the current issue is presented.
- The case under consideration
- The issue with the court’s decision
- Problem evaluation (Your valued contribution towards research).
- Give a quick recap of the issue.
- Your problem evaluation and/or
- The solution you came up with.
- The solution’s strengths.
- The solution’s drawbacks.
- Describe why you believe your option is the most effective.
- The Conclusion.
How to Write a Law Review Introduction
The utmost essential step to take at the introduction of a law review article is to catch the reader’s interest and give them optimism that what follows will be genuinely captivating. This is a page-turner, somewhat unconventional, to say the least. Possibly, something not even related to a law review article.
After getting this attention-grab maneuver out of the picture, the reader has to be gently persuaded that, herein as everywhere, freedom and exemption are doubtful, and that the text to follow now is, after all, a law review article.
The introduction should concisely position the majority of the article’s layout. Readers will go to the introduction for assistance if the theme itself is complicated. The introduction of an article should not include any significant surprises, and it is also not the place to provide extensive arguments.
Having stated that,
In most cases, the introduction must be concise i.e. a Maximum of 3-5 double-spaced pages. The length of the introductory section should not be a big deal as long as it does not chew off the arguments and analyses in the main case section of the article.
The article review committee would not immediately discard it if the introduction is just one page or longer than four pages long. It is acceptable if the introduction is comprehensive enough to give out a clear blueprint for the remainder of the article.
Writing the Background in a Law Review Article
The “background” section comes immediately in the Introduction. It is easier to describe existing legislation, facts, or events than it is to articulate and justify an original assertion. Consider this part to be the explanation section for the components that are required to grasp the problem.
For example, if you’re discussing how self-defense weapons should be treated by the law, you’ll need to describe the information concerning such weapons that are required to comprehend under the rules. Explain the origins of stun guns just to the degree that it is required to comprehend the regulatory framework. Do not go into detail about the chemistry of pepper sprays or other similar products.
If you have a prominent example that you want to analyze and compare with the circumstance you’re reporting about, you’ll need to go through it in-depth in the argument section. In the background discussion portion, don’t restate all of this information. And don’t get into the details of the incident if you don’t want to know them to comprehend the law.
Instead, express the applicable rule simply and in as much detail as necessary, citing your sources in the references.
Writing Problem Evaluation of a law review article
A good law review article argument should be (1) original, (3) nonobvious, (4) valuable, (5) strong, and (6) regarded as legally sound, completely novel, and competent by the readers.
This is accurate whether the writer is an undergraduate, a legal secretary, an experienced specialist, or a researcher. The majority of effective original articles include a core thesis or an assertion about the world.
The claim might be a chronological assertion, a statement about the impacts of law, or a remark about how judges are evaluating a law, or it can be a descriptive assertion about the world as it is. It might be a prescriptive statement regarding how something should be done. It might also be a hybrid claim that has both descriptive and prescriptive elements.
The Article’s descriptive and prescriptive sections
The most compelling arguments are those that blend descriptive and prescriptive elements, informing readers about the information they didn’t know before. The argument might be about what tribunals have done, how a judicial ruling affects people’s conduct, or why a law has evolved in a certain way while also recommending what should be performed.
For example,
Start writing on free speech and the law against hostile public accommodation harassment. Then, the first piece of data you should provide is about the tribunals and regulatory bodies that impose penalties when businesses tolerate speech that fosters an ethnically, culturally, religiously or socially hostile atmosphere for some customers.
You might simply evaluate the unfavorable public accommodation environment restrictions and argue why they should be kept, amended, or eliminated using First Amendment precedents and theory.
Adding Novelty
Your article must be unique to be impactful. It has to convey something unique that no one else has expressed before. It’s not adequate that your insights are unique to you in the respect that you thought out yourself.
Here are some ideas on how to make your claim more refined:
- Consider what unique features exist in some of the circumstances addressed by your argument but not in others.
- Consider the arguments you’ll use to back up your assertion. Do they perform well in certain situations but not in others, as you ask? You might choose to restrict the argument as a result.
- Both the easy “yes” and the straightforward “no” answers to most legal inquiries tend to elicit a plethora of literature.
Writing a Conclusion for a Law Review article
The conclusion is meant to bring everything to a close. It virtually always should be a conventional wrap. Since law review, editors are looking for a normative payout, and law review authors should be happy to oblige.
In the end, you should recall individuals of the importance of your essay in the argument. State your main point and the most essential sub-conclusions.
It’s possible that your article began as a strategy to make and verify a single original, nonobvious, valuable, and sound point. However, you may have discovered numerous more innovative, nonobvious, beneficial, and sound points to say in the course of writing your piece to support that central assertion.
Make sure to highlight the ramifications of your argument, as well as your method for addressing it. These assist in demonstrating the significance of not only your issue but also your interpretation, which is your contribution. If you create a test, for example, briefly outline how the test may be used in other situations. If you create a classification scheme, make a quick note of where else it may be useful.
The Mechanics of a Law Review Article
- Use Double spaces.
- Use a one-inch space on all sides.
- Make a page numbering system.
- Do not start a new section on a separate page if there is an opportunity to start it on the previous page. Large swaths of blank paper should be avoided.
- Follow your outline’s Headings and make as many subheadings as necessary.
- Instead of endnotes, use footnotes.
Apart from the procedure mentioned above, best law review articles should always have the following points.
- Make sure that all footnotes are after their respective textual phrases, not in the middle.
- Readers should be guided by a plethora of useful and helpful headings and subheadings, which are just as vital as the content of the piece.
- Use particular graphic techniques to assist you to convey all points easier to grasp, such as numerical listings, bullet points, illustrations, and graphs.
- Long block quotes should be avoided at all costs since they detract from the readability and coherence of your content.
- Make sure that sentence structures vary, and that they aren’t more than 2 to 25 words lengthy.
- To effectively catch readers’ interest, try writing in a more colloquial and polished way.
- Because it seems monotonous and unpleasant, avoid producing a sleep-inducing, front-end, and omnipresent explanation of your law journal articles’ key substance.
However, if you are still uncertain or have very little time on your hand you can always acquire expert assistance online. Hill Papers is the best custom writing service that offers assistance at the most affordable writing rates available. Our staff of top quality writers can flawlessly produce law review articles for any academic or professional level .
Also Read: How to write an article online How to Write a Precis Step by Step
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Bluebook Citation: Law Reviews/Articles & Other Non-Book Publications
- Common Building Block Rules
- Bluepages v. Whitepages
- Regulations & Adminstrative Opinions
- Law Reviews/Articles & Other Non-Book Publications
- Tables & Bluepages Tables
- Electronic Resources
- International Materials
- Foreign Materials
Authors - Rule 15.1 & 16.2
Follow same rules as for books - Rule 15.1 . The only difference is to use normal type (as versus large and small capitals).
In essence, use the authors name as found on the document (and not in reverse, i.e. its first then second name, not last, then first):
- Decimus Junius Brutus.
When there are two authors, use an ampersand:
- Marcus Aemilius Lepidus & Marcus Antonius Creticus.
When there are three or more, use the first followed by et al:
- Gaius Cassius Longinus, et al
Follow the same rules for institutional authors (all Rule 15.1) .
Article and Journal Titles - Tables 13-16
Use the article title as it appears - do not use abbreviations (like in case names). Capitalize according to Rule 8 .
To abbreviate English language periodical titles use tables T13.1, T13.2 and T10 . Omit the words "a," "at," "of," and "the." If the title only consists of one word after the words "a," "at," "of," or "the," do not abbreviate the remaining word (See Table 13).
Examples - Rule 16 & Tables 13-16
James R. Hackney, “Law and Neoclassical Economics: Science, Politics and the Reconfiguration of American Tort Law Theory,” 15 Law and History Review 275, 1997, at page 280.
James R. Hackney, Law and Neoclassical Economics: Science, Politics and the Reconfiguration of American Tort Law Theory , 15 Law and Hist. Rev. 275, 280 (1997).
Author; article title; volume; law review title; page number; pinpoint cite; year
Note: In court documents (bluepages), the article title is underlined. In law reviews, the journal name is in small-caps and the article title is italicized.
For short forms, see Rule 16.9.
Newspapers & Other Non-Conseutively Paginated Materials - Rule 16.6
Generally the same as normal articles. However, as there is no consecutive pagination within a newspaper, you have to specify a location differently (Rule 16.6) .
e.g. Al Baker, Indicting DNA Profiles Is Vital in Old Rape Cases , N.Y. Times , Oct. 18, 2009, at A20,
Note: abbreviations for newspaper extract from the Tables, as with the date abbreviation. Remember for law reviews to use large and small capitals for the newspaper.
These rules also apply to other non-consecutively paginated materials. What does that mean? For example, a collection of magazines bound together in one volume. Between the magazines there is no continuity of pagination. Hence, like newspapers, you have to specify location differently, usually with a specific date (Rules 16.6 - 16.6) .
Subject Guide
Other Types
Other type of documents include:
- Student written law review materials (Rule 16.7.1)
- Student written book reviews (Rule 16.7.2)
- Symposia (Rule 16.7.3)
- Annotations, i.e. ALRs (Rule 16.7.6)
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- Last Updated: Dec 12, 2022 3:11 PM
- URL: https://lawlibraryguides.neu.edu/bluebook
Writing a law school research paper or law review note
- Books and articles
Basics of Format & Content
Research papers are not as strictly structured as legal memos, briefs, and other documents that you've learned about in legal writing and drafting courses. For example, there is no prescribed content/format similar to to the Questions Presented, Brief Answers, etc. that you learned for a legal memo.
A general approach to thinking about the content of a research paper is:
- Introduction in which you give some background and a clear statement of your thesis
- Status quo -- what is the existing law and why is it a problem
- Proposals for change
See this blog post by Jonathan Burns , an IU McKinney alum, for more on basic content.
If you're writing for a law review or seminar, you should get formatting instructions regarding things like margins, font size, line spacing. If you don't, or if you're doing an independent study, here are some basic guidelines to follow:
- Times New Roman or similar, 12 pt font.
- Double spaced lines.
- One inch margins all around.
- Footnotes in academic Bluebook style (use the rules on the main white pages instead of the light blue pages at the front of the Bluebook).
- Footnotes in same font as text, 10 pt font.
- Use Roman numerals and/or letters on headings and subheadings or style the fonts so that the difference between headings and subheadings is clear.
- Page numbers in the footer, preferably centered, especially on first page. You could do bottom center on first page and then upper right in the header thereafter. Use the header and footer functions for this. If you don't know how to use headers and footers in Word, here is help: https://edu.gcfglobal.org/en/word2016/headers-and-footers/1/ .
Headings and subheadings
Research papers should have headings and subheadings. These help your reader follow your logic--and a logical structure is very important. Headings and subheadings can also help you keep your thoughts organized. Just don't overuse them--you don't want every paragaph to have a subheading.
Road map paragraph
Often, research papers will also include a paragraph at the end of the introduction that narrates the road map the paper will follow. Here is an example of this kind of paragraph:
"The section that follows [this introduction] sets the stage by recounting two scenarios from the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law, with discussion of the knowledge and implementation of accessibility features in online instructional materials. The next section provides an overview of various impairments and their effects on a user's experience of the online environment. Next is a review of the laws relevant to accessibility with attention to their potential application to online instruction, along with standards used to guide accessibility compliance. The article then explores the concept of universal design and its guiding principles, followed by a discussion of how to use the universal design principles to organize and better understand accessibility standards and practices. The final section briefly summarizes the discussion and encourages law librarians and professors to become knowledgeable and skilled in universal design for online materials to benefit all their students."
Table of Contents
A table of contents can also be helpful, though it's not necessary. If you add a table of contents to your papers, put it right at the beginning, before the introduction. Here's part of the table of contents for the same paper the paragraph above was taken from--it really just lays out the heading and subheadings with page numbers:
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How to Cite Law Review Articles
Last Updated: January 29, 2023 References
This article was co-authored by wikiHow staff writer, Jennifer Mueller, JD . Jennifer Mueller is an in-house legal expert at wikiHow. Jennifer reviews, fact-checks, and evaluates wikiHow's legal content to ensure thoroughness and accuracy. She received her JD from Indiana University Maurer School of Law in 2006. There are 7 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been viewed 24,206 times.
Law review articles are most often used as sources in legal research. The most common citation methods in the US legal field are the Bluebook and the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD) legal citation styles. [1] X Research source If you are writing a research paper in another discipline, you may also want to use a law review article as a reference. For non-legal research papers, your citation format will vary depending on whether you use the Modern Language Association (MLA), American Psychological Association (APA), or Chicago citation style.
ALWD and Bluebook
- Example: James Wilson Harshaw III,
- If there are 2 authors, separate their names with an ampersand (&). For more than 2 authors, cite the article with the first author's name followed by the abbreviation "et. al."
- Bluebook uses a middle initial instead of a full middle name.
- Example: James Wilson Harshaw III, Not Enough Time?: The Constitutionality of Short Statutes of Limitations for Civil Child Sexual Abuse Litigation ,
- Example: James Wilson Harshaw III, Not Enough Time?: The Constitutionality of Short Statutes of Limitations for Civil Child Sexual Abuse Litigation , 50 Ohio St. L.J. 753
- If the citation is to a specific passage in the article, type a comma and a space after the first page, then the page or page range where the passage appears. For example: James Wilson Harshaw III, Not Enough Time?: The Constitutionality of Short Statutes of Limitations for Civil Child Sexual Abuse Litigation , 50 Ohio St. L.J. 753, 757
- If you're using Bluebook citation, format the name for the journal in large and small caps.
- If you need to find the appropriate Bluebook/ALWD abbreviation, go to https://lib.law.uw.edu/cilp/abbrev.html .
- Example: James Wilson Harshaw III, Not Enough Time?: The Constitutionality of Short Statutes of Limitations for Civil Child Sexual Abuse Litigation , 50 Ohio St. L.J. 753 (1989).
ALWD Footnote Format
First Name Middle Name Last Name, Title of Article in Title Case , Vol# L. Rev. Abbr. Page# (Year).
- Example: DeStefano, John M., III.
- Example: DeStefano, John M., III. "On Literature as Legal Authority."
- If there is a subtitle, place a colon after the title. Type the full subtitle in title case, also capitalizing the first word of the subtitle.
- Example: DeStefano, John M., III. "On Literature as Legal Authority." Arizona Law Review , vol. 49, no. 2,
- Example: DeStefano, John M., III. "On Literature as Legal Authority." Arizona Law Review , vol. 49, no. 2, 2007, pp. 521-552.
MLA Works Cited Format
Last Name, First Name. "Title of Article in Title Case." Name of Journal , vol. xx, no. xx, pp. xx-xx.
- For example, you might write: "Despite having no formal legal authority, judges often cite literature in their opinions (deStefano 523)."
- If you mention the author's name, only the page number is necessary in the parenthetical citation. For example: "DeStefano noted that judges cite literature frequently, even though works of fiction have no binding legal authority (523)."
- If you merely mention the title of the article in the body of your paper, without quoting or paraphrasing the material within the source, you don't normally need a parenthetical citation. However, you should still include an entry in your Works Cited.
- Example: Cahn, N. R. (1999).
- Example: Cahn, N. R. (1999). Civil images of battered women: The impact of domestic violence on child custody decisions.
- Example: Cahn, N. R. (1999). Civil images of battered women: The impact of domestic violence on child custody decisions. Vanderbilt Law Review, 44 , 1041.
APA Reference List Format
Last Name, First Initial. Middle Initial. (Year). Title of article in sentence case: Subtitle of article in sentence case. Name of Journal Vol# , Page#.
- Example: Myths about victims of domestic violence may prevent judges from taking it seriously when making child custody decisions (Cahn, 1999).
- If you mention the author's name in the text, place the publication year in parentheses after the author's name. For example: Naomi Cahn (1999) noted the effects of domestic violence on women's mothering abilities.
- For direct quotations, place a comma after the year of publication, then use the abbreviation "p." or "pp." Type the page or page range where the quote appears.
- Example: Adler, Amy.
- Example: Adler, Amy. "Fair Use and the Future of Art."
- Example: Adler, Amy. "Fair Use and the Future of Art." New York University Law Review 91, no. 3
- Example: Adler, Amy. "Fair Use and the Future of Art." New York University Law Review 91, no. 3 (2016): 559-628.
Chicago Bibliography Format
Last Name, First Name. "Article Title in Title Case." Name of Journal Vol#, no. x (Year): xx-xx.
- Example: Amy Adler, "Fair Use and the Future of Art," New York University Law Review 91, no. 3 (2016): 559-628.
- Use the full page range for the article in your footnote only if you are citing the article as a whole. If you paraphrased or quoted a specific passage within the article, type the page or page range where that passage appears in your footnote.
Expert Q&A
- This article addresses how to cite law review articles in the United States. Different countries have their own legal citation methods. Go to http://guides.lib.uw.edu/ld.php?content_id=38839014 and locate the country on the table to find that country's citation method. ⧼thumbs_response⧽ Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
- Both Bluebook and ALWD legal citation methods only call for footnotes. They do not have bibliographies or reference lists. ⧼thumbs_response⧽ Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
You Might Also Like
- ↑ https://www.law.cornell.edu/citation/
- ↑ https://www.law.cornell.edu/citation/2-800
- ↑ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style/mla_formatting_and_style_guide/mla_works_cited_page_basic_format.html
- ↑ http://libguides.dixie.edu/c.php?g=57887&p=371722
- ↑ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style/mla_formatting_and_style_guide/mla_in_text_citations_the_basics.html
- ↑ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/apa_style/apa_formatting_and_style_guide/in_text_citations_the_basics.html
- ↑ https://politics.ucsc.edu/undergraduate/chicago%20style%20guide.pdf
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How to Review a Journal Article
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For many kinds of assignments, like a literature review , you may be asked to offer a critique or review of a journal article. This is an opportunity for you as a scholar to offer your qualified opinion and evaluation of how another scholar has composed their article, argument, and research. That means you will be expected to go beyond a simple summary of the article and evaluate it on a deeper level. As a college student, this might sound intimidating. However, as you engage with the research process, you are becoming immersed in a particular topic, and your insights about the way that topic is presented are valuable and can contribute to the overall conversation surrounding your topic.
IMPORTANT NOTE!!
Some disciplines, like Criminal Justice, may only want you to summarize the article without including your opinion or evaluation. If your assignment is to summarize the article only, please see our literature review handout.
Before getting started on the critique, it is important to review the article thoroughly and critically. To do this, we recommend take notes, annotating , and reading the article several times before critiquing. As you read, be sure to note important items like the thesis, purpose, research questions, hypotheses, methods, evidence, key findings, major conclusions, tone, and publication information. Depending on your writing context, some of these items may not be applicable.
Questions to Consider
To evaluate a source, consider some of the following questions. They are broken down into different categories, but answering these questions will help you consider what areas to examine. With each category, we recommend identifying the strengths and weaknesses in each since that is a critical part of evaluation.
Evaluating Purpose and Argument
- How well is the purpose made clear in the introduction through background/context and thesis?
- How well does the abstract represent and summarize the article’s major points and argument?
- How well does the objective of the experiment or of the observation fill a need for the field?
- How well is the argument/purpose articulated and discussed throughout the body of the text?
- How well does the discussion maintain cohesion?
Evaluating the Presentation/Organization of Information
- How appropriate and clear is the title of the article?
- Where could the author have benefited from expanding, condensing, or omitting ideas?
- How clear are the author’s statements? Challenge ambiguous statements.
- What underlying assumptions does the author have, and how does this affect the credibility or clarity of their article?
- How objective is the author in his or her discussion of the topic?
- How well does the organization fit the article’s purpose and articulate key goals?
Evaluating Methods
- How appropriate are the study design and methods for the purposes of the study?
- How detailed are the methods being described? Is the author leaving out important steps or considerations?
- Have the procedures been presented in enough detail to enable the reader to duplicate them?
Evaluating Data
- Scan and spot-check calculations. Are the statistical methods appropriate?
- Do you find any content repeated or duplicated?
- How many errors of fact and interpretation does the author include? (You can check on this by looking up the references the author cites).
- What pertinent literature has the author cited, and have they used this literature appropriately?
Following, we have an example of a summary and an evaluation of a research article. Note that in most literature review contexts, the summary and evaluation would be much shorter. This extended example shows the different ways a student can critique and write about an article.
Chik, A. (2012). Digital gameplay for autonomous foreign language learning: Gamers’ and language teachers’ perspectives. In H. Reinders (ed.), Digital games in language learning and teaching (pp. 95-114). Eastbourne, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Be sure to include the full citation either in a reference page or near your evaluation if writing an annotated bibliography .
In Chik’s article “Digital Gameplay for Autonomous Foreign Language Learning: Gamers’ and Teachers’ Perspectives”, she explores the ways in which “digital gamers manage gaming and gaming-related activities to assume autonomy in their foreign language learning,” (96) which is presented in contrast to how teachers view the “pedagogical potential” of gaming. The research was described as an “umbrella project” consisting of two parts. The first part examined 34 language teachers’ perspectives who had limited experience with gaming (only five stated they played games regularly) (99). Their data was recorded through a survey, class discussion, and a seven-day gaming trial done by six teachers who recorded their reflections through personal blog posts. The second part explored undergraduate gaming habits of ten Hong Kong students who were regular gamers. Their habits were recorded through language learning histories, videotaped gaming sessions, blog entries of gaming practices, group discussion sessions, stimulated recall sessions on gaming videos, interviews with other gamers, and posts from online discussion forums. The research shows that while students recognize the educational potential of games and have seen benefits of it in their lives, the instructors overall do not see the positive impacts of gaming on foreign language learning.
The summary includes the article’s purpose, methods, results, discussion, and citations when necessary.
This article did a good job representing the undergraduate gamers’ voices through extended quotes and stories. Particularly for the data collection of the undergraduate gamers, there were many opportunities for an in-depth examination of their gaming practices and histories. However, the representation of the teachers in this study was very uneven when compared to the students. Not only were teachers labeled as numbers while the students picked out their own pseudonyms, but also when viewing the data collection, the undergraduate students were more closely examined in comparison to the teachers in the study. While the students have fifteen extended quotes describing their experiences in their research section, the teachers only have two of these instances in their section, which shows just how imbalanced the study is when presenting instructor voices.
Some research methods, like the recorded gaming sessions, were only used with students whereas teachers were only asked to blog about their gaming experiences. This creates a richer narrative for the students while also failing to give instructors the chance to have more nuanced perspectives. This lack of nuance also stems from the emphasis of the non-gamer teachers over the gamer teachers. The non-gamer teachers’ perspectives provide a stark contrast to the undergraduate gamer experiences and fits neatly with the narrative of teachers not valuing gaming as an educational tool. However, the study mentioned five teachers that were regular gamers whose perspectives are left to a short section at the end of the presentation of the teachers’ results. This was an opportunity to give the teacher group a more complex story, and the opportunity was entirely missed.
Additionally, the context of this study was not entirely clear. The instructors were recruited through a master’s level course, but the content of the course and the institution’s background is not discussed. Understanding this context helps us understand the course’s purpose(s) and how those purposes may have influenced the ways in which these teachers interpreted and saw games. It was also unclear how Chik was connected to this masters’ class and to the students. Why these particular teachers and students were recruited was not explicitly defined and also has the potential to skew results in a particular direction.
Overall, I was inclined to agree with the idea that students can benefit from language acquisition through gaming while instructors may not see the instructional value, but I believe the way the research was conducted and portrayed in this article made it very difficult to support Chik’s specific findings.
Some professors like you to begin an evaluation with something positive but isn’t always necessary.
The evaluation is clearly organized and uses transitional phrases when moving to a new topic.
This evaluation includes a summative statement that gives the overall impression of the article at the end, but this can also be placed at the beginning of the evaluation.
This evaluation mainly discusses the representation of data and methods. However, other areas, like organization, are open to critique.
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How To Write A Law review Article
- July 14, 2022
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Many law students feel like they need to write a law review article to be a success in the legal field. But what is a law review article? How to write a law review article? A law review article is a piece of writing that critically analyzes and interprets the law. It usually takes the form of an analytical commentary on a case or legislation. To write a successful law review article, you need to be able to research and analyze the law and then communicate your findings clearly and concisely.
What Is A Law Review Article?
A law review article is an academic journal article written by a law professor. Law review articles typically feature a detailed analysis of a particular legal issue, and they are often cited by courts and legislators. While most law review articles are published in traditional print journals, an increasing number are being published online. Whether in print or online, law review articles can be a valuable resource for lawyers and law students seeking to keep up with the latest legal developments.
Types Of Law Review Articles
As anyone who has gone to law school knows, there are different types of law review articles. The most common types are case studies , legislation reviews, and empirical studies.
- Case studies analyze a particular legal case in depth, usually with the help of secondary sources.
- Legislation reviews provide an overview of a particular area of law, often with a focus on how recent changes in the law may affect future cases.
- Empirical studies use data from real-world legal cases to test hypotheses about how the law works in practice.
Each type of article has its strengths and weaknesses, and each serves a different purpose:
- Case studies are best for understanding how the law applies to specific situations
- Legislation reviews provide a broad overview of the law.
- Empirical studies are useful for testing hypotheses and generating new ideas , but they can be less accessible to readers who are not familiar with statistical methods.
How To Choose A Topic For Your Law Review Article?
You need a topic that’s important to you, that you can research and write about without getting burned out, and that will be of interest to the people who read law reviews. Make a list of all the things you’re interested in. Yes, everything. Don’t self-edit yet, just let the ideas flow. Now look at that list and ask yourself which of those topics would make a good law review article.
Here are some questions to help you narrow it down:
- What controversial topics are you passionate about?
- What topics are you knowledgeable about?
- What topics would be helpful to your future career?
- What topics have others already written about extensively?
- What topics have others not written about enough?
- What hot button issues are currently being debated in the courts or among legislators?
- What topics interest you but you don’t know much about yet?
How To Research Your Law Review Article
The best way to research your law review article is to treat it like a blog post. That means you should start by doing a quick Google search to see what other people are saying about the topic. Then, read a few of the articles that come up in your search results. Once you’ve done that, it’s time to start writing your article .
The key is to make sure that you’re providing new information that isn’t already out there. To do that, you’ll need to cite primary sources as much as possible. That means looking for cases, statutes, and regulations that are relevant to your topic. Once you’ve found those sources, it’s time to start writing your article .
Remember: the goal is to provide new insights and perspectives on the law, so don’t be afraid to be creative in your approach.
Writing The Introduction To Your Law Review Article
Assuming you’ve got a paper to write , and that it’s a law review article (a specialized type of paper, usually around 10,000 words), here’s how to start:
- The introduction is perhaps the most important part of your article . It’s where you state your case, make your argument, and try to persuade the reader to care about what you’re saying.
- You need to start with a strong hook that draws the reader in. This could be an interesting statistic, a stirring quote, or something else that grabs attention.
- You need to provide some context for your argument. What’s at stake? Why does this matter?
- You can state your thesis clearly and concisely. What are you trying to prove? How will you do it?
- End with a road map that tells the reader what to expect in the rest of the article . This will help them follow your argument and see how everything fits together.
Writing The Body Of Your Law Review Article
In any discipline, the body of your work is the evidence that supports your claims. In a law review article, the body is where you lay out the case law, statutes, and other support for your arguments. The best way to approach writing the body of your law review article is to start with an outline. This will help you to organize your thoughts and focus on the most important points.
Once you have an outline , it’s time to start writing. Begin by introducing the main point of each section, and then provide the supporting evidence. Be sure to cite all of your sources, so that readers can easily find the original material. With a clear structure and well-supported arguments, you can write a persuasive body for your law review article.
Writing The Conclusion To Your Law Review Article
The conclusion is your last chance to make an impression on the reader. So don’t underestimate its importance. The conclusion should briefly summarize the main points of your article and leave the reader with a strong sense of closure. But be careful not to simply restate your thesis or regurgitate your main arguments.
Instead, try to find a way to end on a high note, perhaps by offering provocative insights or suggesting future directions for research. Whatever you do, make sure your conclusion is memorable and encourages the reader to think critically about the issues you have raised.
Editing And Proofreading Your Law Review Article
If you’re like most people, the first draft of your law review article is going to be pretty rough. That’s okay. The important thing is to get your ideas down on paper (or screen). Once you’ve got a draft, it’s time to start editing and proofreading . The best way to edit your work is to take a break from it for a day or two. This will help you to come back to it with fresh eyes.
Once you’ve had a chance to look at it again, it’s time to start making changes. Cut out any unnecessary words or phrases, and reorganize your ideas into a more logical order. Finally, don’t forget to proofread your work for typos and grammar errors. A little bit of effort at this stage will go a long way towards making your article more readable and polished.
How To Cite Sources In A Law Review Article
Whenever you claim something in your law review article, it’s important to back it up with evidence. Otherwise, your argument will seem weak and unconvincing. The best way to do this is to cite sources that support your position. By including quotes, statistics, and other relevant information from authoritative sources , you can add weight to your argument and make it more persuasive.
However, it’s important to cite your sources correctly. Otherwise, you could be accused of plagiarism. When in doubt, always include a full citation for each source, including the author’s name, the date of publication , and the page number where the relevant information can be found. By taking the time to properly cite your sources, you can give your argument more credibility and make it more convincing.
Formatting A Law Review Article
As any law student knows, writing a law review article can be a daunting task. There are a lot of rules and guidelines to follow, and it can be difficult to know where to start. However, with a little planning and attention to detail, it is possible to format a law review article correctly. Here are some tips to keep in mind:
- When creating the title page, be sure to include the author’s name, the title of the article , and the name of the law review. The title page should also include the date of publication.
- When formatting the body of the text, use a standard font such as Times New Roman or Arial. The text should be double-spaced and have 1-inch margins all around. Be sure to include footnotes or endnotes as needed.
- When creating the bibliography, list all of the sources used in alphabetical order. Include both print and electronic sources. If you used any primary sources, be sure to note this fact.
Submitting A Law Review Article For Publication
The process of submitting an article for publication can be daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. Here are a few tips to get you started:
- Identify the journals that are the best fit for your article .
- Consider the journal’s audience, focus, and style when making your decision
- Once you’ve identified a few journals that might be a good fit, take a look at the submission guidelines.
- Each journal has different requirements for submissions, so it’s important to make sure your article meets all of the requirements.
- Once your article is ready to submit, most journals will require you to create an account on their website.
- From there, you’ll be able to upload your article and provide additional information about yourself and your article.
- And, once your submission is complete, all that’s left to do is wait for a decision from the journal. The entire process can take several months, so be patient!
Tips For Getting Your Law Review Article Accepted For Publication
The best way to get your law review article accepted for publication is to start by understanding what the editors are looking for. In general, they’re looking for two things: novelty and relevance. But what does that mean? Novelty means that your article should offer something new to the conversation.
It should be based on original research, and it should offer a new perspective on a familiar topic. Relevance means that your article should be of interest to the journal’s readership. It should be timely, and it should address an issue that the journal’s editors believe is important.
What To Do If Your Law Review Article Is Rejected For Publication
You need to understand that being rejected isn’t personal. It doesn’t mean your article wasn’t good enough or that you’re not a good enough writer . It simply means that it didn’t fit with what that particular publication was looking for. If you’re like most people, your natural reaction to rejection is to give up and move on to something else. But if you want to see your article in print, there are a few things you can do.
- Take a close look at the publication’s guidelines and make sure your article meets all of the requirements. If it doesn’t, there’s no point in submitting it.
- Try to figure out why your article was rejected. Was it too long or too short? Was it poorly organized or poorly researched? Once you’ve identified the problem, you can try to fix it and resubmit your article to the same publication or a different one.
- Don’t be afraid to ask for feedback from the editors. They may not always give it, but if they do, it can be invaluable in helping you improve your article and increase your chances of being published.
How To Promote Your Law Review Article Once It Is Published
Your law review article is finally published. Now what? Just because your work is available online doesn’t mean people will find it. You need to promote your article if you want it to be read. The good news is that there are several ways to get the word out about your work. Here are a few ideas:
- Share a link to your article on social media, including a brief description of what it’s about.
- Send an email to your colleagues and contacts, letting them know about your article and why they might find it interesting.
- Write a blog post about your article, highlighting key points and providing links for further reading.
- Give talks or presentations on your research topic, and make sure to mention your article as a resource for further information.
The process of submitting a law review article for publication is daunting but not impossible. The key to getting your article accepted is making sure that it is both novel and relevant. If your article is rejected, don’t give up – try to identify the problem and fix it before resubmitting. Finally, be proactive in promoting your published article to increase its readership.
What is a law review article?
A law review article is a scholarly article written by a law professor or lawyer that discusses some aspect of the law. Law review articles are usually published in law journals and are often used by lawyers and judges when researching legal issues.
Types of law review articles
There are two main types of law review articles: analytical and doctrinal. Analytical articles focus on discussing and critiquing the law, while doctrinal articles provide a more straightforward explanation of the law.
How to choose a topic for your law review article
When choosing a topic for your law review article , you should consider what area of the law you are interested in and what you hope to accomplish with your article. You should also make sure that your topic is something that you are knowledgeable about and that there is enough existing scholarship on the topic to provide a foundation for your article .
How to research your law review article
Researching a law review article can be a daunting task, but there are a few resources that can be helpful.
You should start with a general search of the law on your topic using online legal research databases such as Westlaw or LexisNexis. Once you have found some relevant cases and secondary sources, you can begin to focus your research by looking for more specific materials.
Finally, it is also helpful to consult with a law librarian or other legal experts to get their insights on your topic and the best way to research it.
Writing the introduction to your law review article
The introduction to your law review article should introduce the reader to the topic of your article and explain why the topic is important. The introduction should also provide an overview of the main arguments and points you will be making in the body of your article .
Writing the body of your law review article
The body of your law review article should be divided into sections and subsections that discuss the different aspects of your topic. Each section should begin with a clear and concise statement of the main point you will be discussing in that section. The remainder of the section should provide support for that main point through the use of cases, statutes, secondary sources, and your analysis.
Writing the conclusion to your law review article
The conclusion to your law review article should sum up the main points of your article and provide a final analysis of the topic. The conclusion should also offer some thoughts on the implications of your findings and where future research on the topic might go.
Editing and proofreading your law review article
Once you have finished writing your law review article, it is important to edit and proofread it carefully before submitting it for publication. Editing your article will help to ensure that it is well-written and free of errors, while proofreading will catch any remaining typos or grammatical mistakes.
How to cite sources in a law review article
When citing sources in a law review article , you should follow the citation format required by the law journal in which you are submitting your article. Most law journals use The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, which provides detailed rules for how to cite a wide variety of legal and non-legal sources.
How to submit a law review article for publication
Once you have finished writing and editing your law review article, you will need to submit it to a law journal for publication. The submission process generally involves filling out an online form and attaching your article as a PDF file. You will also likely need to provide a short abstract of your article and a list of potential reviewers.
Marketing your law review article
After your law review article has been published, you should take some time to market it to your potential audience. You can do this by sending out emails or social media postings about your article , giving talks or presentations on your topic, or writing blog posts or articles that summarize your findings.
How to get law review articles published
The process of getting a law review article published can be long and complicated, but there are a few things you can do to increase your chances of success.
- You should make sure to choose a topic that is timely and of interest to the law journal’s readership.
- You should take care to write a well-researched and well-written article that is clear and concise.
- You should be prepared to revise your article based on the feedback of the law journal’s editors and reviewers.
Tips for success in writing law review articles
There are a few key things to keep in mind if you want to be successful in writing law review articles.
- Choose a topic that you are passionate about and that is likely to be of interest to the journal’s readership.
- Take the time to write a well-researched and well-written article .
- Be prepared to revise your article based on the feedback of the journal’s editors and reviewers.
Why you should write law review articles
There are many benefits to writing law review articles, including the opportunity to share your research with a wider audience, improve your writing skills, and develop your legal knowledge. Additionally, publishing law review articles can potentially lead to career advancement and increased scholarly recognition.
How to get started writing law review articles
If you’re interested in writing a law review article, the first step is to choose a topic that you are passionate about and that is likely to be of interest to the journal’s readership. Once you have chosen a topic, you should begin conducting research and collecting data. Once you have gathered all of the necessary information, you can begin writing your article .
What to keep in mind when writing law review articles
There are a few key things to keep in mind when writing law review articles.
- Take the time to write a well-researched and well-written article.
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How to Write a Law Review Article
How to write a law review article.
By: Tasha Kolesnikova
What Is a Law Review Article?
Step 1: decide upon a relevant research question. , step 2: make a list of all of your headings and subheadings., step 3: create the basic framework., step 4: fill out the outline. , step 5: review and modify., a deeper look: how to research for a law review article, general formatting, line spacing and indenting, tables and graphs, mathematics, start big and narrow it down., number the components, explain the terms of success. , include additional info and a table of contents. , how to create a reference list for a law research paper, add other necessary parts, example of law review article , introduction, prepare yourself, learn which cases produce the best comments , consider whether the court was correct. , check to see if your comment has been preempted. , how long does it take to write a law review article, who can write a law review note, how many pages is a law review article, what makes a good law review, how do you write an abstract for a law review article, what is the difference between a law review article and a comment or note.
Law review articles are secondary research sources for legal study. They thoroughly evaluate and critique legal issues and include copious references to other sources, including primary sources.
Law reviews are frequently edited by law students in collaboration with teachers. They frequently concentrate on new or emerging areas of law and can provide more critical commentary than a legal encyclopedia or ALR item.
Writing a law review article is dedicated to a specific theme, such as real estate or environmental law. It will incorporate the results of a wide range of panels and symposia on relevant legal law review article topics in its contents.
Read on to learn how to write a law review article that will receive excellent feedback during peer review.
These are the basics of writing a law review article:
Before you write a law review article, decide upon a topic. You can start with a general area — and it doesn’t even have to be an area in which you plan to practice. The area should interest you, though, as you’ll spend months on this review.
Immerse yourself in various sub-topics of the general area — then, select a sub-topic and start writing down unanswered questions that you could address in your law review. If you’re having a hard time choosing a topic, your professor can point you in the right direction.
Determine which small questions must be answered before you address the larger question. For example, to answer the larger issue of how to file a consumer lawsuit, you must first answer the following questions (simply make a list of all the questions that spring to mind):
- Who is entitled to launch a consumer case, and who is not?
- Is it possible for a company to register a consumer complaint?
- What academic papers do you need to file a consumer complaint?
- What reasons does the court have to deny my application?
- How long will it take for the case to be decided?
- What kind of remuneration may be expected?
And so forth. Of course, there may be more inquiries. Come up with a few more questions on your own. These questions will form the headings and subheadings in the end.
As a skeleton framework, write down all of the headings and subheadings. This is what this part of the writing process should look like:
Now that your skeleton is complete, you can start filling in the blanks with responses to these specific questions. Remember that any outline may have more questions added to it, and the possibilities are endless. If you wish to write more and respond to relevant questions, you should do so in a separate review.
Caution: Do not begin writing law review articles or researching without completing your skeleton framework. This will save you time and help you become a more organized thinker.
Many folks miss this critical step. First, use a spell-checker and a grammar checker on your article. Amazing software is available. Ask a friend or a mentor to help if you can't afford one. Edit, remove and add material to improve your article.
How to write a law journal article? Above, we mentioned that the first step is to research and select a topic. But there is an overwhelming amount of legal resources available; where should you place your focus?
Westlaw, LexisNexis, and HeinOnline are the most popular online databases for finding law review articles. Westlaw and LexisNexis require a password, whereas HeinOnline is a licensed database that may be accessed by anybody with a valid Loyola ID and password.
Most journal academic articles in Westlaw and LexisNexis are in HTML format, whereas HeinOnline publications are in PDF format. Because PDF documents are a replica of the original print version, they have correct citations and page numbers. HeinOnline also has the advantage of including every issue of each journal it indexes, whereas LexisNexis and Westlaw's collections often only go back to the early 1980s.
LegalTrac, a legal periodicals indexing service, is readily accessible to anybody with a valid Loyola ID and password. It is another subscription database useful for finding law review articles. LegalTrac includes thousands of law-related articles from general interest magazines and all major law reviews, legal newspapers, specialty law publications, bar association journals, and bar association journals.
Using an index to locate law journal articles without a citation is the most effective method. Fortunately, various law review article indexes allow you to search by author, subject, and title. While both print and online sources are given below, most of your research needs will be met using online indexes, including:
- Index to Current Law
- Legal Opinions and Journals on Google Scholar
- Legal Periodicals & Books Index
- Retrospective Index to Legal Periodicals, 1908-1981
- Index of Legal Resources (Westlaw version of Current Law Index)
How to Format a Law Review Article
Not sure how to format a law review article? Here are some formatting tips to keep in mind:
- A title page or abstract is required for a standard format of a law review article. How to write a good law review title? Make it attractive to your target audience by avoiding law jargon in the title
- Your article must be in English (unless the journal expressly permits non-English submissions).
- Send your manuscript as one file, with tables, figures, and appendices (Word, RTF, or PDF files are accepted).
- The pages should be 8.5 x 11 inches.
- Use a single column with justified margins.
- Text—Times New Roman 12 pt. or equivalent font
- 10 pt. Times or equivalent font for footnotes
- Use high-resolution images encoded as PostScript (eps) if figures are provided.
- Copyediting should be done.
- If possible, no page should have more than a quarter of the page empty.
- Unless otherwise specified, all paragraphs are indented. Indent at least two em-spaces.
- Single space your text.
- Except for lengthy quotations, theorems, assertions, and special remarks, do not include extra space between paragraphs. Separate them from the surrounding material with extra space above and below.
- Every line of text should be left-justified (i.e., flush with the left margin). Whenever possible, it should be justified (i.e., flush with the right margin). When possible, the justification is good. Right margins flush intra-, and inter-word spacing is preferable to jagged right margins. Choose the option that appeals to you the most.
- Footnotes should be inserted at the bottom of the page, not at the end of the paper.
- Footnotes should be in 10 point Times New Roman or similar type, single-spaced, and separated by a footnote separator rule (line).
- Footnote numbers or symbols must appear after punctuation in the text.
- Long footnotes should usually go in an appendix.
- All footnotes should be left and right-justified unless otherwise specified (i.e., flush with the right margin).
- Tables and figures should be placed in the document close to text references.
- Avoid using small types in tables.
- Tables and figures should have 1.5 inches left, right, top, and bottom margins (3.8 cm).
- Italicize Roman characters used as variables.
- Italicizing Roman characters in multi-letter function names is optional.
- Whenever possible, subscripts and superscripts should be smaller than the main text.
Creating the Roadmap of a Law Review
Any law student could benefit from tips for writing a law review article roadmap. The first paragraph of your law review will function as a “Roadmap” or "umbrella" paragraph. To answer the question, “how to write a law review intro,” you summarize the relevant field of law into a road map that shows the reader what your memo will cover.
Start with a broad overview of the law, and then narrow it down as necessary. Try to divide your explanation of the law into discrete factors that you will explore in your memo. These "sub-issues" or "components" are like ingredients; they form the law when combined. By properly distinguishing and identifying each element of the law, you give the reader a much better grasp of how the law works and, as a result, of the chances of success in the specific situation at hand.
When presenting these discrete components of the law in your umbrella, number them to ensure that the reader recognizes the sub-issues as distinct from one another. In a perfect world, you'll organize your discussion in the same order as you did in your umbrella paragraph. The more clearly you define the rule and its components in your umbrella, the easier it will be for your reader to follow your analysis.
Your umbrella paragraph is a good spot to tell the reader about the standard of review or how a court will evaluate each part of the legislation. In this regard, it is critical that you clearly explain what is required to succeed. To succeed, should you meet the conditions of each sub-issue? Or do you use a balancing test that just needs you to analyze each component and weigh the data as a whole? Who bears the onus of proof? Is this a legal or a factual issue? You don't have to respond to all of these queries, but they are the kinds of procedural concerns that should be addressed in your umbrella paragraph.
You may include more information beyond a description of the law and the standard of review as you see fit, but don't get too specific because you'll go over each of the sub-issues in greater depth below. A table of contents would also be great to include, although it’s not necessary.
All of the sources used in the research work are listed on the reference page. Whether the material comes from a book, a website, or a journal, it must be properly cited so that the reader can find it. A writer must make sure that every source used in the paper is noted. After paraphrasing, pupils tend to remember about referring, according to experience. As a result, the required online pages are no longer available, and book pages are no longer available.
The following are the essential needs for the reference page:
- Each reference should be prepared in accordance with the style guide in use (MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.) The features of the styles should not be blended.
- The authors' last names should be alphabetical on the reference page.
- The reference page should list all of the resources utilized in work. If one of the items in the list is missing, the paper may be considered plagiarized.
- It's important to pay attention to proper formattings, such as spacing and indentation.
An APA citation is given under the example of a law review article found later in this guide.
Putting together the Final Draft
Before preparing your final draft, try to put your article aside for a while. This makes it easier to see any gaps or errors in your work objectively.
Rethinking your ideas, refining your arguments, restructuring paragraphs, and rewording sentences are all examples of revising. You may need to expand on your thoughts, provide more proof to back up your claims, or remove content that isn't essential.
Read your paper aloud to yourself. This can sometimes make it easier to see awkward or unclear writing. Then, have another person read the document and let you know if anything is unclear or perplexing.
- Scope: Statement of the Research Paper 's Problem/Aim/Scope: This may entail presenting a skeleton of your topic. Simply put, you must define your "research problem" under this subheading.
- Limitations: This aims to limit the extent of your research topic - the things you don't want to include in your paper, such as any other connected issue or areas that could broaden the scope of your research. So this is where you limit the scope of your topic to what you would desire as a researcher.
- Hypotheses/Research Questions: There is a significant distinction between " research questions " and developing a "hypothesis" for a research article. As a researcher, you would ask research questions to learn more about your subject. On the other hand, a hypothesis is a presumption or assumption that is used to further one's research.
- Chapterization: Your research should be divided into logical flow by chapters, which should mirror what your research questions are asking. The number of chapters should not be fewer than three, and they should be structured in a logical order. Your first chapter might be an introduction to your issue, followed by a second chapter that answers your concerns about the area, and a third chapter that compares and contrasts your topic.
Want to see a law review in action? Check out this law review article example !
Monopoli, Paula A. “Marriage, Property and [in]Equality: Remedying ERISA's Disparate Impact on Spousal Wealth.” The Yale Law Journal - Home, 4 Nov. 2009.
Other Legal Writing: How to Write a Law Review Note
How to write a law review introduction for a note? It should include a description of the problem, a thesis statement , and a roadmap of the argument that will be presented throughout the body of the argument.
This section should be used to provide a general overview of your Note's background material, on which the later analysis will be built. A basic and broad discussion of the major topics relating to your topic should be included, as should an educational component that informs your readers about all they need to know to grasp your Note. Remember to write in a way that a reader who is unfamiliar with your Note topic can easily comprehend when you write this section.
Part II: This section should provide an overview of the important cases and statutes that will be discussed in your Note. It will contain the bulk of your analysis of where the law stands at the time of writing. Consider the following example: if your issue is a circuit split, Part II would be the section in which you would describe the contradictory holdings and rationales. Another option is to discuss what other commentators have said about your issue and the cases you are discussing.
This section will present your analyses and viewpoints on the subject matter. You will explain why you believe the cases/commentary you analyzed are incorrect and what you believe should be done in their place. Describe which side of a circuit split is preferable and why. Include your unique views and suggestions in Part III as well as the conclusion of your Note, which should be included in Part II.
The final section of the research report should be a summary of the key points of the legal study. In contrast, the conclusion should not be made up of terms from the main body or the opening. Maintaining logical consistency with the arguments offered in the main section is crucial. In addition, no new arguments are allowed in this area.
Additional note: If you aren’t sure how to write a law review note, it may appear logical to write the introduction first. However, it is practically impossible to do so before the main body of the paper has a solid thesis. As a result, the introduction should be written when the author knows where his or her argument will lead. To put it another way, it should be written after the main part is finished.
What Else to Keep in Mind While Writing a Law Note
In Parts I-III, you might want to consider utilizing subheadings. They aid in the organization of your Note and show the reader where you intend to go. Second, at the beginning and end of each of your portions, you might want to include extremely brief roadmap paragraphs or transition sentences.
"In this section, we'll talk about..." "The following section examines..." While this will repeat your roadmap paragraph in the Introduction and at the endings or starts of the other portions, it will direct the reader and demonstrate that you know where you're headed with your argument.
Endnotes are a great place to put the information you don't want to include in the text. Endnotes can be used as a secondary source of information (in law journal articles are frequently longer than the main text). The endnotes should follow the Bluebook's 19th edition. Make sure your Bluebooking is up to date!
Because you will have no prior knowledge of the subject, it will be difficult to include a sentence without an endnote in Parts I and II of your Note. While Part III could theoretically include some unique thought, this will not be the case if you choose a viewpoint mentioned in Part II. Because Part III contains little or no new material, your endnotes will be filled with "See supra" and "See id." sentences.
All of your side concerns should be included in the endnotes. Around 70-80 endnotes should be expected. You won't have time to fill in the citations once you've completed writing your Note, so make sure you do your endnotes as you go.
If you’re wondering how to write an analysis for a law review article, review the previous student Notes. Reading previously produced Notes will help you become more comfortable with the Note format and organization, as well as the writing quality and citations required of competitors.
Keep in mind that your major virtues are clarity and concision. Make an effort to change up your tone and phrasing. It's important not to over-quote from the sources. Rather, write so that the reader can see a sophisticated comprehension of the struggle even if you're quoting from a source, and attempt to express the point in your own words and voice.
More Legal Writing: How to Write a Law Review Comment
When writing a law review comment, you’ll talk about a specific case and its legal implications. A superior comment is made in response to a situation that satisfies one of the following criteria:
- There is a conflict between the opinions of the lower court and the opinions of the appeal court.
- It's all about first impressions.
- It is legally significant and has a significant amount of disagreement.
What about how to write a law review comment on a district court opinion? Well, this is not recommended since it lacks precedential relevance and contains insufficient content for a comment.
Consider these arguments before writing for a law review comment:
- The case was erroneously decided. Show why the court was incorrect.
- Although the court is correct, it is correct for the wrong reasons. Demonstrate how the court made the wrong decisions and explain what should have been done instead.
- The court missed the point. Examine a point in the case that you believe the judge overlooked.
- The decision of the court is correct. Make sure to address any potential counter-arguments.
The most crucial step in the law publishing process is preemption checking. A thorough preemption check ensures that a comment is unique. The more original a comment is, the more likely it is to be published.
You are not preempted if:
- You find a sample article on your topic, but it was written years ago, and new and exciting themes have emerged since.
- You read a rebuttal article on your problem.
- You find an article on your topic. This is usually a summary, with your comment offering more detail.
- You find an article with a similar beginning or context. A similar opening is fine if the rest of your essay is unique.
If you find a recent essay on your topic that makes the same case and comes to the same conclusion as you, you are generally preempted.
If you follow the tips listed above and read through the example we provided, you’ll be well on your way to writing a good law review article. But if you want a phenomenal article, you can get paper writing assistance from legal writing experts at Studybay — with this service, you can get help with topic selection, research, writing, citations, and more.
The response is heavily influenced by the word count, the writer's prior experience writing law review articles, the topic of the article, and the writer's competence. It is believed that an experienced writer, if writing in their area(s) of competence, can probably create a high-quality law review paper of 20-25,000 words in less than 40 hours.
Aspiring Law students and Law teachers are both eligible to write Law review notes. However, in most cases, Law students write review notes as part of their study plan or when they are pursuing a Doctorate . They tend to work towards publishing as many law review articles as possible. We at Studybay have experts who can write them for you!
The length of the article is determined by the subject matter. The gold standard for legal scholarship, however, has remained fairly unchanged over time: an essay in an academic journal of approximately 40-60 law review pages with approximately 200-250 footnotes (40-60 law review pages with 200-250 footnotes). Anything less than this is consigned to the ignominy of being a "plus."
It should be a general and broad examination of the key topics connected to your topic that informs your readers about everything they need to know in order to comprehend your evaluation. It must be well-documented and unique. For example, while a survey of previous literature on a given subject can make a great term paper , it is unlikely to provide enough novel analysis for a strong review.
An abstract submission, which serves as a synopsis of what you want to write/research on the topic, is typically submitted before the whole and final article. The peer reviewer can use this as a filter. As a result, you must provide a concise outline of the research topic and purpose in the abstract (approximately 200-300 words).
Notes or Comments are works of legal scholarship written by law students, typically during their second year of law school and their first year of membership in a law journal. A Note or Comment may be selected for publication in the author's law journal. By contrast, articles are often authored by non-students, such as law professors or subject-matter experts.
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How to Write a Law Review Article
Whether you write a simple paragraph, an essay, or a thesis, you must ensure that it comes out as you had planned so that the time and effort you put into writing any of these should not go in vain. For instance, if you are writing an essay. you need to make sure that you give enough time and focus well to meet all the instructions. Besides that, your essay should be well-written to get an A grade. With that said, if you need to write a law review article, read the article below thoroughly enough to understand and learn how to write a law review article.
What is a Law Review Article?
In addition, a law review article focuses on a specific topic, such as environmental law or real estate. Its components will include the outcomes of a broad range of panels and symposia on appropriate legal law review article topics.
Whether you are in high school or college, you will almost certainly have to tackle different writing tasks. Since it does not rely on one’s personal knowledge and expertise, an article review is, therefore, one of the most difficult tasks for many students.
Step 1: Find a Relevant Research Question
The first step to learning how to write a law review article is to choose a topic for your law review article before you actually begin writing. You can begin with a broad topic. Besides, it does not even have to be one in which you intend to start practicing.
Step 2: Make a list of Everything that You Want to Include
Once you figure out what you want to write about, determine which minor questions should be addressed before moving on to the larger issue. For instance, to answer the major question of how to file a client’s lawsuit, you should first answer the following questions:
Step 3: Create Your Fundamental Framework
Introduction.
The first part of a law review article is its introduction. This is also the main part of the paper. After all, if one could construct a strong enough introduction, he can definitely make his reader keep on reading his paper.
You can use the next section of your paper to provide a comprehensive overview of the source material in your Note, on which the subsequent analysis will be based.
For instance, if you are addressing an issue such as a circuit split in your review paper, you will have to illustrate any contradictory argument that others can make against your argument. Other than that, you can also choose to talk about what any other write would have said regarding the issue you are dealing with.
The final section of you law review article is a summary of the main idea and the supporting arguments that you have added in your law review article. Here you have to explain why the case you have studied is evidently incorrect. Besides, make sure that you add no new content in the conclusion. However, try to keep on the rythem from the previous sections of your paper.
Step 4: Write
Step 5: putting together the draft.
Besides, revising includes reconsidering your ideas, perfecting your arguments, restructuring your paragraphs, and rephrasing sentences that need more work. In addition to that, you may need to broaden your ideas, provide more evidence to back up your claims, or eliminate unnecessary content
Step 5: Review and Edit
Besides, as a writer, you must ensure that every source referenced in the paper is properly cited. Hence, check the the following bullets to learn how to create a reference list for your law review article.
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- Intellectual Property
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- REPRINTS & PERMISSIONS
Out of Tune: Eleventh Circuit Permits Retrospective Relief for Timely Copyright Claims under Discovery Rule
The US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit furthered a circuit split in holding that, as a matter of first impression, a copyright plaintiff’s timely claim under the discovery rule is subject to retrospective relief for infringement occurring more than three years before the suit was filed. Nealy v. Warner Chappell Music, Inc. , Case No. 21-13232 (11th Cir. Feb. 27, 2023) (Wilson, Jordan, Brasher , JJ.)
Section 507(b) of the Copyright Act includes a three-year statute of limitations that runs from the time the claim accrues, and a claim may only accrue one time under the discovery rule. In 2014, the US Supreme Court held in Petrella v. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc. , that the equitable doctrine of laches does not bar copyright claims that are otherwise timely under the three-year limitations period set forth in § 507(b). The circuits are split on Petrella ’s application—the Second Circuit strictly limits damages from copyright infringement to the three-year period before a complaint is filed, whereas the Ninth Circuit permits retrospective relief for infringement occurring more than three years before the lawsuit’s filing as long as the plaintiff’s claim is timely under the discovery rule.
Music Specialist and Sherman Nealy (collectively, Music Specialist) filed a copyright infringement suit against Warner alleging that Warner was using Music Specialist’s musical works based on invalid third-party licenses and in violation of 17 U.S.C. § 501. The alleged copyright infringement occurred as early as 10 years before Music Specialist filed the present lawsuit. The district court denied Warner’s motion for summary judgment on statute of limitation grounds, finding that there was a genuine dispute of material fact regarding when Music Specialist’s claim accrual occurred. In a separate order, the district court certified for interlocutory appeal whether “damages in this copyright action are limited to the three-year lookback period as calculated from the date of the filing of the Complaint pursuant to the Copyright Act and Petrella .” Music Specialist appealed.
The Eleventh Circuit concluded that where a copyright plaintiff has a timely claim for infringement occurring more than three years before the filing of the lawsuit, the plaintiff may obtain retrospective relief for that infringement. The Court found that Petrella focused on the application of 17 U.S.C. § 507(b) to claim accrual under the injury rule, not the discovery rule, and was therefore inapplicable. The injury rule precludes recovery for harms occurring earlier than three years before the plaintiff files suit. On the other hand, the discovery rule permits damages recovery for infringing acts that copyright owners reasonably become aware of years later. Therefore, the discovery rule permits timely claims for infringement that occurred more than three years before the suit. The Eleventh Circuit found that the Supreme Court expressly reserved application of the discovery rule’s propriety for a future case and that, in the Eleventh Circuit’s opinion, the plain text of the Copyright Act does not place a time limit on remedies for an otherwise timely claim.
Practice Note: The Eleventh Circuit disagreed with the Second Circuit’s approach for 17 U.S.C. § 507(b)’s application to the discovery rule, thereby furthering the circuit split on this issue. Until and unless the Supreme Court elects to resolve this question, practitioners should be aware of the different approaches taken by the circuits when choosing a venue or asserting statute of limitation arguments.
- REPRINTS & PERMISSIONS
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About this Author
Kavya Rallabhandi is an Associate at Mintz's D.C. office. She focuses her practice on intellectual property litigation matters.
While in law school, Kavya was the Executive Guide Editor of The George Washington International Law Review , Senior Editor of The Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law Brief , member of the Moot Court Board and President of the South Asian Law Student Association. She served as a judicial intern for the Honorable Mary Kay Vyskocil of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York and as a law clerk for the US Department...
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Justice Dept. Finds Pattern of Discriminatory Policing in Louisville
The review, undertaken after a specialized unit killed Breonna Taylor in a botched raid in 2020, paints a damning portrait of a department in crisis.
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By Glenn Thrush
WASHINGTON — The police department in Louisville, Ky., engaged in a far-ranging pattern of discriminatory and abusive law enforcement practices, the Justice Department said on Wednesday after conducting a two-year investigation prompted by the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor by the police in 2020.
In a damning 90-page report , investigators painted a grim portrait of the Louisville Metro Police Department, detailing a variety of serious — at times shocking — misconduct. They included the use of excessive force; searches based on invalid and so-called no-knock warrants; unlawful car stops, detentions and harassment of people during street sweeps; and broad patterns of discrimination against Black people and those with behavioral health problems.
The conduct of the police department “has undermined its public safety mission and strained its relationship with the community it is meant to protect and serve,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said at a news conference in Louisville, appearing alongside the city’s mayor and acting police chief. “This conduct is unacceptable. It is heartbreaking.”
The Justice Department’s findings, he said, were succinctly captured by an unnamed Louisville police leader shortly after the investigation began: “Breonna Taylor was a symptom of problems that we have had for years.”
The findings in Louisville, released amid a backlash against a reform movement galvanized by police killings and beatings of Black people, served as a reminder of the dysfunction that still afflicts law enforcement agencies . Nor will it be the last: The Justice Department is investigating similar complaints about discriminatory practices in Minneapolis, New York, Oklahoma City, Mount Vernon, N.Y., Phoenix, Worcester, Mass., and Louisiana.
Ms. Taylor, an emergency room technician, was shot and killed by police officers assigned to a drug enforcement unit in March 2020 during a botched raid of her apartment. Her death prompted protests across the nation and calls for police reform.
The Justice Department interviewed hundreds of officers and community members, assessed body camera video from dozens of officers and reviewed hundreds of incidents. The 1,000-member police department is responsible for the city of Louisville and surrounding metropolitan region, a majority-white area with segregated pockets of predominantly Black neighborhoods. The force is about 80 percent white, the report noted.
Mr. Garland said investigators uncovered instances of blatant racism against Black residents, including the disproportionate use of traffic stops in Black neighborhoods and the hurling of epithets like “monkey,” “animal” and “boy.”
Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, said that the targeting of Black people for traffic stops and searches turned conventional law enforcement practices into “weapons of oppression, submission and fear.”
But the inquiry uncovered an endemic pattern of dysfunction that went far beyond racial discrimination, finding widespread problems in the way the police handled investigations of domestic violence and sexual assault cases, including allegations of misconduct by law enforcement officers.
The Killing of Breonna Taylor
The death of breonna taylor, a black woman, in march 2020 fueled national protests over police brutality..
- What Happened: Ms. Taylor was shot by police in Louisville, Ky., during a botched drug raid. Here is what to know about her death .
- Victim’s Profile: The 26-year-old woman hoped to become a nurse. An ex-boyfriend’s run-ins with the law entangled her as she tried to move on .
- Her Legacy: After Ms. Taylor’s killing, protests demanding justice rocked Louisville for months. Black engagement in Kentucky politics soared.
- The Aftermath: In 2022, federal officials charged four current and former officers for crimes including violating Ms. Taylor’s rights and lying on the search warrant used to search her home. Kelly Goodlett was the first officer to be convicted after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy.
One woman told the Justice Department she had informed police officials that a narcotics detective was extorting sex from her daughter and two other women he had accused of drug possession. The accusation was labeled “unfounded” — but proved to be true five years later, when three more women came forward with similar accusations. The detective resigned but was never prosecuted.
The Justice Department praised the dedication of the units responsible for investigating domestic violence incidents and sexual assaults, but said their work was undermined by budget cuts that consolidated disparate divisions, leading to increased caseloads and forcing detectives to investigate crimes for which they had no training.
The abuse, Ms. Clarke said, extended to people with mental illness in the city, who were mistreated and mocked by officers. She cited one example in which a man with behavioral issues was arrested 25 times in two years, and in some of his encounters, the police “needlessly escalated the situation and used unreasonable force.” He later died in custody.
The investigation found that police routinely used force that was disproportionate to the threats they faced, including by using neck restraints, choking, Tasers and even dogs to subdue citizens. From 2016 to 2021, 71 dog bites were logged.
In one incident, a burly officer physically assaulted a distraught and intoxicated 110-pound woman who had been crying and yelling while sitting on her friend’s lawn.
After standing back for a minute and a half, “the officer rushed up to the crying woman as she fought with her friends and used his boot to push her torso to the ground.” He then beat her face with his flashlight “over and over again” when she tried to bite the outside of his heavy shoe, they wrote.
The officer was not disciplined.
In another incident, an officer ordered his dog to bite a Black 14-year-old boy — who was lying on the ground, face down in the grass during a search after a home invasion.
“The officer deployed his dog off-leash — without giving any warning — and ordered the dog to bite the teen at least seven times,” the report said. “Despite the teen staying prone and pleading, ‘OK! OK! Help! Get the dog please!,’ officers stood over him shouting orders for nearly 30 seconds while the dog gnawed on his arm.”
The child had serious injuries to his arm and back and had to be hospitalized.
The Justice Department also took the police to task over their crackdown on protesters who called for reforms in the days after Ms. Taylor’s killing. Officers “used riot sticks, less-lethal munitions, or chemical agents against protesters who did no more than passively resist or disperse more slowly than officers desired” in violation of demonstrators’ First Amendment rights.
Local officials said the report accurately reflected the complaints they have heard from citizens, especially Black people, over the years.
Mayor Craig Greenberg of Louisville, a Democrat who vowed to overhaul the department after taking office in January, called the abuses outlined in the investigation “a betrayal of the integrity and professionalism that the overwhelming majority of our officers bring to their job every day and every night.”
He added, “We will not make excuses, we will make changes.”
The investigation is likely to lead to a consent decree, a court-approved deal between the department and local governments that establish and enforce a road map for training and operational changes.
Already, current and former city officials, who cooperated with the investigation, have begun carrying out many of the 36 recommended reforms in the report, Mr. Garland said. They have also paid a $12 million wrongful death settlement to Ms. Taylor’s family.
After Ms. Taylor’s death, the city passed Breonna’s Law, banning “no-knock” warrants , which allowed officers to break into a residence without warning.
Local officials have also expanded their use of mental health counseling for officers, revamped training programs, appointed an inspector general and civilian review board to monitor the department, and established an internal auditing system.
But the police department has been in a state of turmoil since Ms. Taylor’s death, and Mr. Greenberg is interviewing candidates to serve as the permanent police chief.
The use of so-called pattern or practice investigations virtually stopped during the Trump administration, but since taking over in 2021, Ms. Clarke and the associate attorney general, Vanita Gupta, have initiated eight, including an inquiry into the Minneapolis Police Department after the killing of George Floyd.
The results of that investigation have yet to be released.
In an unrelated action, the department announced on Wednesday that it was examining the Memphis Police Department’s special units, at the request of city officials, after the brutal beating of Tyre Nichols, a Black man, during a traffic stop in January. The department is also working on a guide on how to monitor such units, officials said.
The investigation into the Louisville Metro Police Department is separate from the federal criminal investigation into the members of the drug enforcement unit who broke down the door to Ms. Taylor’s apartment, killing her as they fired a volley of shots at her boyfriend.
No drugs were found in Ms. Taylor’s home, and one former Louisville detective, Kelly Goodlett, has pleaded guilty to helping falsify information on the warrant.
Last August, the department indicted Joshua Jaynes, a former detective, and Kyle Meany, a former sergeant, with federal civil rights and obstruction offenses for their roles in preparing and approving a false search warrant affidavit that resulted in Ms. Taylor’s death.
Another former detective, Brett Hankison, was charged with federal civil rights offenses for firing his weapon into the apartment through a covered window and door. He was acquitted on three counts of endangering Ms. Taylor’s neighbors in March last year.
The officers have denied wrongdoing.
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Judge uses a slavery law to rule frozen embryos are property
FAIRFAX, Va. (AP) — Frozen human embryos can legally be considered property, or “chattel,” a Virginia judge has ruled, basing his decision in part on a 19th century law governing the treatment of slaves.
The preliminary opinion by Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge Richard Gardiner – delivered in a long-running dispute between a divorced husband and wife – is being criticized by some for wrongly and unnecessarily delving into a time in Virginia history when it was legally permissible to own human beings.
“It’s repulsive and it’s morally repugnant,” said Susan Crockin, a lawyer and scholar at Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics and an expert in reproductive technology law.
Solomon Ashby, president of the Old Dominion Bar Association, a professional organization made up primarily of African American lawyers, called Gardiner’s ruling troubling.
“I would like to think that the bench and the bar would be seeking more modern precedent,” he said.
Gardiner did not return a call to his chambers Wednesday. His decision, issued last month, is not final: He has not yet ruled on other arguments in the case involving Honeyhline and Jason Heidemann, a divorced couple fighting over two frozen embryos that remain in storage.
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Honeyhline Heidemann, 45, wants to use the embryos. Jason Heidemann objects.
Initially, Gardiner sided with Jason Heidemann. The law at the heart of the case governs how to divide “goods and chattels.” The judge ruled that because embryos could not be bought or sold, they couldn’t be considered as such and therefore Honeyhline Heidemann had no recourse under that law to claim custody of them.
But after the ex-wife’s lawyer, Adam Kronfeld, asked the judge to reconsider, Gardiner conducted a deep dive into the history of the law. He found that before the Civil War, it also applied to slaves. The judge then researched old rulings that governed custody disputes involving slaves, and said he found parallels that forced him to reconsider whether the law should apply to embryos.
In a separate part of his opinion , Gardiner also said he erred when he initially concluded that human embryos cannot be sold.
“As there is no prohibition on the sale of human embryos, they may be valued and sold, and thus may be considered ‘goods or chattels,’” he wrote.
Crockin said she’s not aware of any other judge in the U.S. who has concluded that human embryos can be bought and sold. She said the trend, if anything, has been to recognize that embryos have to be treated in a more nuanced way than as mere property.
Ashby said he was baffled that Gardiner felt a need to delve into slavery to answer a question about embryos, even if Virginia case law is thin on how to handle embryo custody questions.
“Hopefully, the jurisprudence will advance in the commonwealth of Virginia such that ... we will no longer see slave codes” cited to justify legal rulings, he said.
Neither of the Heidemanns’ lawyers ever raised the slavery issue. They did raise other arguments in support of their cases, however.
Jason Heidemann’s lawyers said allowing his ex-wife to implant the embryos they created when they were married “would force Mr. Heidemann to procreate against his wishes and therefore violate his constitutional right to procreational autonomy.”
Honeyhline Heidemann’s lawyer, Kronfeld, argued that Honeyhline’s right to the embryos outweighs her ex-husband’s objections, partly because he would have no legal obligations to be their parent and partly because she has no other options to conceive biological children after undergoing cancer treatments that made her infertile.
Kronfeld also argued that the initial separation agreement the couple signed in 2018 already treated the embryos as property when they concurred — under a subheading titled “Division of Personal Property” — that the embryos would remain in cryogenic storage until a court ordered otherwise.
Gardiner has not yet ruled on the argument over Jason Heidemann’s procreational autonomy.
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Brawley PD to pursue leads on shooting suspect
- By Staff Reporter
- Mar 9, 2023
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BRAWLEY — On March 6, 2023, at approximately 1545 hours, the Brawley Communications Center received multiple 911 calls regarding a male subject trying to shoot two other subjects in the South Alley of the 100 block of Main St. Officers arrived on scene and contacted victims. The victims stated a young thin Hispanic male adult was walking across their property and they confronted the suspect. A verbal altercation ensued and the suspect pulled out a pistol and shot at them. One of the victims sustained a minor injury from one of the bullets. The suspect fled the area on foot.
Due to the seriousness of the case, it was turned over to the Brawley Police Department Detective Unit. Extensive follow up investigation has been conducted and is ongoing to exhaust all available leads in an attempt to identify the subject responsible.
It is believed the suspect’s age is between the late teens to early twenties. He was last seen wearing what appeared to be a tan sweatshirt and dark colored shorts. Please refer to the attached images of the suspect. To view video please visit: https://neighbors.ring.com/event/VNyQ5P2hGZ
This is an active and ongoing investigation, anyone with additional information pertaining to this case or able to identify the suspect should contact Detective Sergeant J. Morales at (760) 351-3018.
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FBI Pledges to Advance Women in Policing
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National 30x30 pledge aims to bring more women into policing to improve public safety, community outcomes, and trust in law enforcement
Recently, the FBI signed the 30x30 Pledge that will help improve the representation and experiences of women in law enforcement. As part of our pledge, the FBI will review recruitment, hiring, retention, and promotion policies and procedures to advance our diversity developments.
Currently, women make up 12% of sworn officers and 3% of police leaders in the United States. The goal of the 30x30 Initiative is to engage 30% of women in police recruit classes by 2030 and to ensure policing agencies are truly representative of the jurisdictions they serve. While 30x30 focuses on advancing women in policing, these principles are applicable to all demographic diversity.
Our pledge is the foundational effort of the 30x30 Initiative, a partnership of police leaders, researchers, and professional organizations that have joined together to advance the representation and experiences of women in all ranks of policing across the United States.
“The FBI is committed to ensuring our work environment supports the recruitment, development, and advancement of our female sworn officers,” says FBI Director Christopher Wray. “This important commitment reflects our continued dedication to bringing more women into our special agent cadre, FBI police, and the FBI’s leadership ranks. We are honored to join more than 260 of our policing partners in making this commitment.”
The 30x30 Initiative is affiliated with the Policing Project at NYU School of Law and the National Association of Women Law Enforcement Executives (NAWLEE).
“We are grateful to the FBI for committing to join this growing movement,” said Maureen McGough, co-founder of the 30x30 Initiative, chief of strategic initiatives of the Policing Project at the New York University School of Law, and former policing expert at the U.S. Department of Justice. “We believe strongly that advancing women in policing is critical to improving public safety outcomes. We look forward to having more agencies follow the FBI’s lead by signing the pledge and working to improve the representation and experiences of women in policing.”
For more information, visit 30x30initiative.org .
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Before you spend considerable time and energy writing a law review article, make sure that you are covering new ground. Use the following Westlaw databases to determine whether articles on your subject have already been written. Current Index to Legal Periodicals CILP Texts and Periodicals-All Law Reviews, TP-ALL Texts, and Bar Journals
Article by Matthew Tokson Trademark Law Navigating the Identity Thicket: Trademark's Lost Theory of Personality, the Right of Publicity, and Preemption Both trademark and unfair competition laws and state right of publicity laws protect against unauthorized uses of a person's identity.
Legal encyclopedias contain brief, broad summaries of legal topics, providing introductions to legal topics and explaining relevant terms of art.They also provide citations to relevant primary law and sometimes give citations to relevant major law review articles.
The last date for Law Review submissions through its service was March 31, 2021. Its complete shutdown of services was June 30, 2021. JOURNAL POLICIES FOR SUBMISSION Allen Rostron and Nancy Levit compiled a table of journal policies for publication, Allen Rostron & Nancy Levit Information for Submitting Articles to Law Reviews & Journals (2021).
In the context of law school, a law review is an entirely student-run journal that publishes articles written by law professors, judges, and other legal professionals; many law reviews also publish shorter pieces written by law students called "notes" or "comments."
A law review article is essentially a scholarly article about a legal issue or topic. Therefore, they are cited the same way your citation style recommends citing journal articles. See below for examples from APA, MLA, and Chicago style. HPU Libraries subscribes to HeinOnline, which contains a collection dedicated to full-text law review articles.
The Boston University Law Review provides analysis and commentary on all areas of the law. Published seven times per year, the Law Review contains articles contributed by law professors and practicing attorneys from all over the world, along with notes written by Law Review staff. 2022-2023 Boston University Law Review Members.
This Article proposes an innovative approach to addressing political inequality: using law to facilitate organizing by the poor and working class - as workers, tenants, debtors, and welfare beneficiaries. The Article offers a new direction for the literature on political inequality and critical less… Retroactive Adjudication Samuel Beswick
What is a law review article? Law reviews are research articles that are produced by law students in collaboration with faculty personnel. They include long articles and brief notes from academics and attorneys, as well as student remarks, observations, and changes in the law.
In law reviews, the journal name is in small-caps and the article title is italicized. For short forms, see Rule 16.9. Newspapers & Other Non-Conseutively Paginated Materials - Rule 16.6 Generally the same as normal articles. However, as there is no consecutive pagination within a newspaper, you have to specify a location differently (Rule 16.6).
If you're writing for a law review or seminar, you should get formatting instructions regarding things like margins, font size, line spacing. If you don't, or if you're doing an independent study, here are some basic guidelines to follow: Times New Roman or similar, 12 pt font. Double spaced lines. One inch margins all around.
Law review articles are most often used as sources in legal research. The most common citation methods in the US legal field are the Bluebook and the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD) legal citation styles. [1] If you are writing a research paper in another discipline, you may also want to use a law review article as a reference.
How to Review a Journal Article. For many kinds of assignments, like a literature review, you may be asked to offer a critique or review of a journal article.This is an opportunity for you as a scholar to offer your qualified opinion and evaluation of how another scholar has composed their article, argument, and research.That means you will be expected to go beyond a simple summary of the ...
In the summer of 2019, I first heard Bennett Capers describe an early draft of Against Prosecutors. We were at a national conference of criminal law professors, and Capers was presenting to a crowded room. The draft that would turn into Capers's 2020 Cornell Law Review article posed a novel question: given prosecutors' role in […]
A law review article is a piece of writing that critically analyzes and interprets the law. It usually takes the form of an analytical commentary on a case or legislation. To write a successful law review article, you need to be able to research and analyze the law and then communicate your findings clearly and concisely. Contents show
Includes select secondary sources such as American Law Reports, legal encyclopedias, treatises, law review articles, 50 state surveys, legal forms, and Restatements. Also includes the citator KeyCite. Access only available on Library computers in the Law Library Reading Room; limit of 3 simultaneous users.
How to Write a Law Review Article Step 1: Decide upon a relevant research question. Step 2: Make a list of all of your headings and subheadings. Step 3: Create the Basic Framework. Step 4: Fill Out the Outline. Step 5: Review and Modify. A Deeper Look: How to Research for a Law Review Article How to Format a Law Review Article General Formatting
A law review article is a secondary source of a legal study. It carefully analyses and constructively criticizes legal issues, and adds numerous references to secondary and primary sources. In addition, a law review article focuses on a specific topic, such as environmental law or real estate.
The National Law Review - National Law Forum LLC 3 Grant Square #141 Hinsdale, IL 60521 Telephone (708) 357-3317 or toll free (877) 357-3317. If you ...
The Law Journal Library is HeinOnline's signature collection of more than 3,100 fully searchable, image-based journals, each dating back to the first issue ever published. This scholarly journals database spans more than 43 million pages and 40 disciplines, bridging a crucial research gap. REQUEST A QUOTE.
Shapiro, The Most-Cited Law Review Articles Revisited, supra note 1. 10. The more than 1,620 periodicals on HeinOnline do include hundreds of non-U.S. titles, although none of the foreign articles appear even to come close to qualifying for Hei- nOnline's "most-cited" rankings. ...
The review, undertaken after a specialized unit killed Breonna Taylor in a botched raid in 2020, paints a damning portrait of a department in crisis. Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you ...
Exclusively submitting to a law review is a definitive way to communicate that it's your first pick and move your article toward the top of the queue. Keep track of law review opening timelines As you narrow down your law review shortlist, you'll want to start thinking about submission timing.
Law Review. A law school publication containing both case summaries written by student members and scholarly articles written by law professors, judges, and attorneys. These articles focus on current developments in the law, case decisions, and legislation. Law reviews are edited by students, and students contribute notes to featured articles.
FAIRFAX, Va. (AP) — Frozen human embryos can legally be considered property, or "chattel," a Virginia judge has ruled, basing his decision in part on a 19th century law governing the treatment of slaves. The preliminary opinion by Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge Richard Gardiner ...
BRAWLEY — On March 6, 2023, at approximately 1545 hours, the Brawley Communications Center received multiple 911 calls regarding a male subject trying to shoot two other subjects in the South Alley of the 100 block of Main St. Officers arrived on scene and contacted victims.The victims stated a young thin Hispanic male adult was walking across their property and they confronted the suspect.
National 30x30 pledge aims to bring more women into policing to improve public safety, community outcomes, and trust in law enforcement. Recently, the FBI signed the 30x30 Pledge that will help ...