Friday, February 11, 2005

More on Law Reviews

I see from Orin Kerr that the Harvard Law Review in particular has now said that it prefers articles under 25,000 words or 50 law review pages. This reminds me that when I was a student editor, Harvard Law Review accepted this piece for publication. You may not want to download the entire PDF file, however, because it is 460 pages long.

At the time, I thought that it was the height of ridiculousness for an academic journal to publish a 460-page "article" that should have been published as a book. Needless to say, my views did not prevail. The article came along during my third year, when I had come to sympathize with the reason that the famous judge Learned Hand gave for resigning from the Harvard Law Review after four months.1 I'm just glad I graduated before the article had to be cite-checked.

1As quoted in Gerald Gunther's biography Learned Hand: The Man and the Judge 44-45 (1994), Hand said that he had gone to law school "to get a legal education, not to edit or write parts of a magazine, a law magazine."

Stuart Buck

1 Comments:

Blogger Raffi said...

I spent part of this evening trying to explain law journals to a medical student. I'm afraid that incredulity was the main reaction. And that was when I was telling this person that articles were as long as 100 pages. 460! heh.

Also, the Gunther biography is Hand is a mighty book indeed.

Waddling thunder

11:40 PM  

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