A Proposal for Review Articles in the Legal Academy

Law professors (and students) –

How legal scholarship might be improved is a subject of never-ending discussion.  Lately, I was thinking it would be useful to have more review articles in legal scholarship.  By this I mean papers which tried to objectively summarize the state of understanding surrounding a given topic, as opposed to presenting any new empirical findings, theories, observations, or insights.

Such articles are common in other fields, particularly in the sciences, where they are called review articles.  Such articles summarize or discuss the experimental results published by others, as opposed to reporting anything new.

Would these be useful for the law?  I think so.   There is so much legal scholarship published nowadays that it has become harder to keep track of what is going on, particularly for those even slightly outside of the field, let alone the bar or academics from other fields.   It is true that law articles often summarize their field in a “Part I” but that’s often brief and calibrated to the piece in question.

So here is what I mean in more detail:

-  A Law Review would establish a new category of article, called the “academic review”

-   It would solicit an established academic in the field to summarize the last few decades or so of scholarship in the field (or more if needed).  Examples might be “Patent theory” or “Empirical studies of the tort system” or “Criminal Punishment” or “Customary International Law.”

- The point of the piece would be to summarize the academic work done in the field over some relevant period, in a clear, relatively straightforward manner.

- The point would not be to summarize legal developments (i.e., new cases etc.) but rather theoretical or empirical contributions. This I think is an importance difference with hornbooks or continental scholarship.

- Bias would obviously be a potential problem, giving reason for multiple law reviews to commission different experts. In addition, excessive bias would hopefully be punished by reputational damage.

- The incentive to write such articles would come from the fact that they would probably be far more read than typical law review pieces, given how much ground they cover.  Also, summarizing a field can be quite fun.

- The review articles might also be a good way for good but less well-known or cited articles, or those that didn’t place well to gain deserved attention.   Stated otherwise, the review article could help minimize the effects of reputation and placement for how much attention a paper gets later.

- Two potential models for such pieces are the Harvard Law Review’s yearly invitation to some academic to write about the Supreme Court’s last term, and the commissioned articles that appear in the occasional legal encyclopedia.

- Tenured professors would be best situated to write review articles, both because of their experience and perspective, but also because current tenure standards tend to focus on original research.

-  While it is also generally true that review articles are today not highly valued in the legal academy, but the point of this proposal is to change that norm.