What could possibly warrant a description such as this?
▪ “Useless blather puffed up with self-indulgence.”
▪ “Like drunkards use lampposts: more for support than for illumination.”

No, we aren’t talking about some persona non grata. We’re talking about law reviews, an integral organ of any given law school anatomy. These and other similar comments were thrown around in an open debate on the application of existing law review articles.

Legal scholars are all agreeing that the importance of law reviews is diminishing. Dean David Rudenstine of Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law criticized law reviews as being “useless blather.” Other judges concurred that the revered status that law reviews once enjoyed has gradually withered away, leaving them to circumvent through the wordy, albeit worthy, articles.

Judge Sack lamented that the bench clings onto law reviews like a “drunkard us[ing] [a] lamppost.” Instead of being illuminated by law reviews, judges use it merely for support. This, he notes, is a drastic difference from how things once were, when the “mostly practical content of law reviews [played] a significant element [in] judicial decision-making.”

Judge Richard A. Posner and Randy Kozel, a law clerk and a former articles committee chair of the Harvard Law Review, further explored law reviews’ content in their article, Are Law Reviews Really Rubbish? Posner criticized present law reviews for being too verbose and inundated with explanatory footnotes and unrelated content.

However, Kozel conceded that student-edited journals aren’t as bad as presumed. There is hope. Kozel asserted that that the cure does not lie in who edits the articles (students or faculty), but in the students’ and faculty’s ability to select and edit interdisciplinary pieces. He suggested that peer review and “time-intensive analysis of each article's arguments and contribution” will mollify the troubled condition of many law reviews.

Kozel is convinced that the root of the problem lay in the article submission process. He claims that existing system of “simultaneous submissions” exerts tremendous pressure on student editors and results in hastily written, verbose, insubstantial, and dull reviews. Instead of emphasizing a review’s content, the legal community has put undue importance on a review’s name, school, and publication details. In short, legal reviews have forsaken quality for a brand name.

Kozel ruminated about whether there were any alternatives for “incremental improvements,” and then suggests a few plausible solutions like exclusive submissions, the limitation of the number of journals, and improved student-faculty communication channels.

The fate of law reviews is not altogether bleak, though, if schools actively rectify the underlying problems that cause poor reviews. Kozel positively noted that student editors are doing a “good job” and that law reviews allow them to play an important role in shaping the interpretation of law. With the right guidance, law reviews can still reach its full potential.