What insight does Senator Obama have about law review? Given that he was once the head of the Harvard Law Review, I think he probably has a lot of thoughts about them. And have you seen the discussion lighting up the legal blogosphere about citations to the Obama-led volume (104)? It seems to have started, as so much interesting discussion does, with David Bernstein, then VDare, whatever that is, followed it up, and then it went into Paul Caron's shop--first at Adjunct Prof and then Caron weighed in with his characteristically insightful and moderate comments. One enterprising anonymous commentator compiled some most interesting statistics on citations to the Harvard Law Review by volume over the past twenty years or so. Very shortly I'm going to have some thoughts on longitudinal studies of elite law reviews.
I agree with those who say that what happened at the Harvard Law Review years ago--particularly as measured by citations--has little probative value about Senator Obama's qualifications to be President. And, please, let's not fall into the trap of using citations as the only measure of quality. In the careful and wise words of Ian Ayers and Fred Vars, “extreme modesty is in order” when interpreting citation studies. Everyone ought to remember that, but this is politics, so I'm not optimistic about this. Still, what a great topic for the faculty lounge: politics and citations to law reviews! The perfect storm, eh? Can you imagine a confluence of topics law profs would like better?
But some of Obama's insight on politics in general applies to law reviews, I think. Take a gander at this excerpt from his speech after the South Carolina election:
After we won Iowa, everybody was so excited. Everybody said oh look at this an African American is winning in a state where there are almost no African Americans and young people are excited, and everybody's excited and young people came out. And I think people started thinking you know this is a lark. ... But you know the status quo doesn't give up easily.
Sounds remarkably like law reviews, doesn't it? Thanks to Volokh and Leiter and the people at co-op and prawfs and in many others places, we started to have discussion of law in places not mediated by the gatekeepers of our profession (i.e., second and third year students), the reviews adapted. In the wake of the internet came Yale's Pocket Part and Harvard's on-line review and some others as well.
I've been critical of late of bloggers (and here), so let me temper that with something positive: bloggers have changed the nature of the dissemination of ideas. Just don't expect things to change too quickly or without struggle. Because, law review doesn't give up that easily!
Soon, though, I'm going to talk about "law review editorship as training for hierarchy." And I bet you can't wait for that.
Alfred Brophy
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