Law Reviews Matter More Than You Think
It turns out that law review may not be so irrelevant in the courtroom after all. According to a study released last month on the website of the Social Science Research Network and reported this week in the National Law Journal, citations of law review articles in judicial opinions are on the rise. The finding contradicts the belief that law reviews are forums exclusively for academics, rather valuable tools to those who practice law.
Two law professors led the study: David L. Schwartz of the Chicago-Kent College of Law and Lee Petherbridge of Loyola Law School – Los Angeles. The professors found that, contrary to popular belief, “Over the last 20 years – there has been a marked increase in the frequency of citation to legal scholarship in the reported opinions of the circuit court of appeals.”
According to their study, there were twice as many legal scholarship citations over the 10-year period from 1999 through 2008 as there were in the 30-year period from 1950 through 1979. Seventy percent of all law review citations since 1950 have occurred in the past 20 years, the research concluded.
These findings may come as a surprise to some of the country’s judges, several of whom have gone out of their way to criticize law reviews as exceedingly theoretical and irrelevant. Other judges, though, clearly do attend to developments in legal scholarship, suggesting that so, too, should the lawyers representing clients before them. The challenge, of course, is in reading selectively, finding articles most likely to aid your practice. In this content-saturated world, that is no easy task.
