he next decade could witness the
end of
the law review as we know it. At first glance, this contention might seem implausible - after all,
the law review is the supreme institution of the contemporary American
legal academy. Virtually all accredited law schools have one; quite a
few have several. Law schools depend upon law reviews for publicity
and prestige. Law professors depend upon law reviews for publication
and promotion. Law students depend upon law reviews for education and
employment.
[i.2] The law review, however, is hardly an inevitable
institution. It
emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the
product of the fortuitous interaction of academic circumstances and
improvements in publishing technology. Today, new academic
circumstances (not least among which is an increased 
professorial
dissatisfaction with law reviews themselves) and new computer-mediated
communications technologies (e.g. on-line services and the Internet)
are coming together in a way that may soon lead to the demise of the
familiar law review in favor of a more promising system of scholarly
communication.
...new academic circumstances...and new computer-mediated communications
technologies...are coming together in a way that may soon lead to the demise of the familiar law
review.....
[i.3] In this article, I undertake a comprehensive
re-assessment of the law
review from the perspective of the present age of cyberspace. In
Part I, I begin this re-assessment by
investigating the academic and
technological conditions that initially joined to generate the form.
In Part II, I trace the course that criticism of
the law review has
taken since the institution's debut, showing how criticisms have grown
in number, range and intensity to the point of their current
crescendo; I explore why various criticisms arose when they did, and
evaluate erstwhile (and, as it turns out, largely failed) attempts at
reforming the law review system for the benefit of its academic and
professional constituencies. In Part III, I
examine how new computer-mediated communications technologies embodied
in WESTLAW, LEXIS, and the Internet's so-called "electronic journals"
have subtly begun to change and improve the law review system, even if
those particular services do not and cannot cure the system's more
profound ills. In Part IV, I offer a "modest
proposal" for the electronic self-publishing of legal scholarship that
would use the
full potential of today's computer technology to overcome the
editorial and material limitations of the law review format while
providing legal scholars with an unprecedented range of intellectual
and professional opportunities. In the Conclusion to this article, I
consider what legal scholars, law school Deans and faculties, the
Association of American Law Schools and even the editors of law
reviews themselves might do to accelerate or at least accommodate the
transition to the proposed system of electronic self-publication.
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