Law Review Usage and Suggestions for Improvement: A Survey of Attorneys, Professors, and Judges
It's fashionable to criticize law reviews. In the literature on law reviews, author after author lambastes the journals for their content and their style, and only the rare, obstinate defender attempts to counter the view that the principal medium of legal scholarship does nothing right. The attacks on law reviews are often entertaining, with authors letting loose strings of invectives and snappy prose, elements of style that the critics readily point out are missing from most publications. While this complaint literature may be amusing, and occasionally does ring true, the criticisms inevitably are based on personal views supported solely by anecdotal evidence. No one has systematically asked law review consumers what they think. This survey project attempts to remedy the lack of empirical data. We asked randomly selected attorneys, judges, and law professors a series of