Last Writes? Re-assesing the Law Review in the Age of Cyberspace

The full-text version of this article1 offers a comprehensive re-assessment of the law review from the perspective of the present age of cyberspace. Such a re-assessment is best begun with an investigation of the academic and technological conditions that initially joined to generate the genre. The standard story setting out the origin of the American law review runs as follows: in 1887, a group of enterprising Harvard law students, backed by visionary faculty and supportive Harvard alumni, commenced publication of a student-edited legal periodical (the Harvard Law Review) which soon became the model for many others. The story is factually accurate, but conceptually inadequate. It downplays the extent to which the law review served the general interests of the university-based law school as a formerly-marginal institution seeking greater distinction for its programs and its students in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America. It presents the law review as the creature of narrow legal considerations where there is at least circumstantial evidence to suggest that a desire to match the new journalpublishing projects of numerous other disciplines (e.g. medicine, chemistry, history) might have animated the professors who supported the student initiatives at Harvard and elsewhere. Most important for present purposes, the traditional story totally disregards technological developments in the printing and publishing industries in particular, the development of high-speed rotary presses and improved paper-making processes that in the late nineteenth century radically lowered printing costs and made law school sponsorship of legal periodicals financially and conceptually plausible for the first time. In light of these factors, the initial spread of law reviews to a variety of law schools can be seen as a logical outgrowth of contemporary circumstances, rather than as an instance of institutions across the United States simply following the leader

Martial Lawyers: Lawyering and War-Waging in American History

American lawyers like to celebrate themselves as practitioners of peaceful dispute resolution. On public and professional occasions they proudly proclaim their loyalty to the rule of law over brute force. From the very beginnings of colonization, however, lawyers in America have been primary wagers of war. Leaving aside for the moment professional soldiers who only proliferated in significant numbers in the late 19th century, lawyers as an occupational group have been uniquely prominent in American history as invaders, battlefield commanders and soldiers, militia leaders, armed revolutionaries, filibusters, rebels, paramilitary intelligence agents, proponents of militarism, and civilian war managers. Over the course of four centuries, American lawyers have enthusiastically organized war, led war, and fought war. This article argues that war has shaped American lawyers professionally as well as personally, and that lawyers have in turn shaped the American way of war

Yesterday Once More: Skeptics, Scribes and the Demise of Law Reviews

Readers of the present collection of commentaries in this Special Issue of the Akron Law Review will recognize these points. They are all criticisms of the system of electronic self-publication that I proposed in my Web-posted article Last Writes? Re-assessing the Law Review in the Age of Cyberspace. But they are also recognizable from another context. Five hundred years ago, every one of them was leveled at the scholarly proponents of commercial printing

Last writes? The law review in the age of cyberspace

This article reassesses the history and future of the law review in light of changing technological and academic conditions. It analyzes why law reviews developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and describes how three different waves of criticism have reflected shifting professorial, professional and pedagogical concerns about the genre. Recent editorial reforms and the inauguration of on-line services and electronic law journals appear to solve some of the law review's traditional problems, but the author suggests that these procedural and technological modifications leave the basic criticisms of the law review system unmet. In this context, the author proposes that legal writers self-publish on the World Wide Web, as he has done in an extended version of the present piece. This strategy would give legal writers more control over the substance and form of their scholarship, would create more opportunities for spontaneity and creativity, and would promote more direct dialogue between legal thinkers

Last writes? The law review in the age of cyberspace

This article reassesses the history and future of the law review in light of changing technological and academic conditions. It analyzes why law reviews developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and describes how three different waves of criticism have reflected shifting professorial, professional and pedagogical concerns about the genre. Recent editorial reforms and the inauguration of on-line services and electronic law journals appear to solve some of the law review's traditional problems, but the author suggests that these procedural and technological modifications leave the basic criticisms of the law review system unmet. In this context, the author proposes that legal writers self-publish on the World Wide Web, as he has done in an extended version of the present piece. This strategy would give legal writers more control over the substance and form of their scholarship, would create more opportunities for spontaneity and creativity, and would promote more direct dialogue between legal thinkers

E-Journals, Archives and Knowledge Networks: A Commentary on Archie Zariski's Defense of Electronic Law Journals

, Professor Archie Zariski asserted that, despite recent musings to the contrary, electronic legal periodicals have a bright future in the age of the Internet. This article challenges that contention, arguing that in law as in other disciplines, the reach, dynamism and interactivity of the Internet offer opportunities for the development of new scholarly publishing paradigms - in particular, archives and "knowledge networks" - which have the potential to enrich and envigorate legal learning more than even the most progressive electronic legal journals