Aren't you involved in that?

"When Rendering Decisions, Judges are Finding Law Reviews Irrelevant," goes the headline in one of today's TimesSelect articles.

Many law professors seem to think they are under no obligation to say anything useful or to say anything well. They take pride in the theoretical and in working in disciplines other than their own. They seem to think the analysis of actual statutes and court decisions — which is to say the practice of law — is beneath them.

I can't begin to count the number of times I've applied this same critique to law school lectures by these very same professors. It's especially true, I think, of professors and lectures in "the twenty schools in the top 10" where classrooms become sounding boards for normative policy arguments and the prof's next letter to the ALI or to Congress, the next amicus brief, and of course, the next law review article.

The upshot is that the legal academy has become much less influential. “I haven’t opened up a law review in years,” said Chief Judge Dennis G. Jacobs of the federal appeals court in New York. “No one speaks of them. No one relies on them.”

Well now that can't be true, the big selling point to prospective law journal members around here is "Whateverjournal is one of only 8 law reviews in the Supreme Court chambers" or in this court or that, or the most cited by other articles...someone must be reading them, right?

In the 1970s, federal courts cited articles from The Harvard Law Review 4,410 times, according to a new report by the staff of The Cardozo Law Review. In the 1990s, the number of citations dropped by more than half, to 1,956. So far in this decade: 937.


Patterns at other leading law reviews are similar. And the drop in the number of citations understates the phenomenon, as the courts’ caseload has exploded in the meantime.

Even when courts do cite law review articles, Judge Robert D. Sack said at Cardozo, their motives are not always pure. “Judges use them like drunks use lampposts,” Judge Sack said, “more for support than for illumination.”

The article blames searchable legal data bases, and blogs, which I think is fair. Though much of my experience with Lexis has been searching the journal databases for various research papers, law review articles are 'forbidden fruit' at the firm - which is to say they can be looked at but never used (and don't dare bill those hours).

To an extent, her plea has been answered by the Internet. On blogs like the Volokh Conspiracy and Balkinization, law professors analyze legal developments with skill and flair almost immediately after they happen. Law professors also seem to be litigating more, representing clients and putting their views before courts in supporting briefs.

And a nod to the hard-working journal members that spend upwards of 30 to 100 hours per semester diligently editing, scrutinizing, re-formatting, dealing with 'difficult' authors, managing the journal itself like a well-greased non-profit machine...

Judge Sack mentioned that he had written a number of law review articles. “I feel your pain,” he said. “As far as I can tell, the only person to have read any of them was the person who edited them.”

Sounds about right, but he forgot the submissions readers.

Bottomline, from personal experience: Journals are for resumes.

Professor and "Formidable Law Blogger" Ann Althouse weighs in in defense of the process, starting with a long-overdue counter-critique to the honorable Judge Jacobs et al.

[O]the theory that I've got some judge and law clerk readers, let me put in my request that they write their damned opinions in a quick, plain and accessible style. Because I'm getting pretty weary of their obfuscatory, evasive, rambling scribblings myself.

Do you feel sorry for the law review editors who work so hard on what the professors write? The editors still get their editing experience. They get their lustrous credential to put on that résumé that will land them the judicial clerkships where they will get more experience working on judicial opinions -- those lengthy, obfuscatory judicial opinions that fail to cite law review articles.

If the very persons who just spent two years working closely on law review articles don't find a way to work law review citations into the opinions they draft and edit, that says a lot about the value of what they chose to publish.

After three years of living, breathing, and trying to emulate these obfuscatory, evasive, and rambling scribblings, I am craving some black-letter. Luckily, I got an email today that my second PMBR shipment has been sent.