Law Review Article Titles

As it's that time of year again - all good profs sending out their articles for the fall submission cycle - I thought I'd take a poll of the best and worst law review article titles of all time.  We've blogged in the past about writing 'catchy' titles and the importance of using or not using a semi-colon.  My understanding is that semi-colons are still out of vogue.

Titles can be important because they need to capture the editor's (not to mention the reader's) interest and describe the article as well, particularly these days when there are so many journal article submissions for editors to wade through.

So what are your best and worst titles?  And has anyone ever had a title changed by an editorial team?

Comments

[Doug Richmond]

I have always liked David Hoffman's "The Best Puffery Article Ever," which appeared in the Iowa law Review a few years ago.

[anon]

I love Fixing Freezeouts just because it is so concise.

[Lawprofblawg]

Any article with the word "rethinking" in the title. Because we just don't think anymore. We rethink. Or any article announcing the "death of" something. If you do a search, you'll find a lot of things have died in legal academia (including but not limited to the forests that have died).

[Saurabh Vishnubhakat]

Dubious as I am about puns (of which there is no shortage among law review article titles), I can't resist the interdisciplinary cheek of Samuel Brunson's "Taxing Polygamy: Married Filing Jointly (and Severally?)"

[alex roberts]

Bob Bone's "Hunting Goodwill." But admittedly I am biased-- trademark law and the Matt Damon film are two of my favorite things.

[Alfred Brophy]

Bill Prewitt, Note, The Crimination of Peeping Toms and Other Men of Vision, 5 Ark. L. Rev. 388 (1951) is often spoken of as one of the great law review titles. I think my torts teacher Al Hill commented on it way back in the fall of 1987. Don't think I've ever read the article.

More recently, I'm partial to Trent McCotter's "Down The Drain: How North Carolina Municipalities Lost Immunity for Storm Drains in Jennings v. Fayetteville."

[Howard Wasserman]

One of my favorites was a student comment on the Supreme Court's 1992 decision regarding the Krishnas at Kennedy Airport: "Public Forum Doctrine Crashes at Kennedy, Nine Killed"

[David J. Garrow]

I've always thought my colleague Tony Infanti's one from several years back is a definite Top 10:
Anthony C. Infanti, The Internal Revenue Code as Sodomy Statute, 44 Santa Clara L. Rev. 763 (2004).
Available at: http://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/lawreview/vol44/iss3/3

[Jason Marisam]

I'm partial to titles that manage to cram a complex concept into a short phrase. In my field of admin law, Elena Kagan's "Presidential Administration" and Cass Sunstein's "Nondelegation Canons" are a couple of good examples.

[Louihen]

Even though it as a colon, for sheer audacity, I've always been amazed by Tushnet's "Darkness on the Edge of Town: The Contributions of John Hart Ely to Constitutional Theory."

[Louihen]

Sorry about the profile pic -- I signed in with facebook and didn't realize it would post this pic.

[Matthew Bruckner]

I really enjoyed both the title and substance of Douglas Baird's "Car Trouble" about the Chrysler and GM bankruptcy cases. However, I believe the title was eventually changed to "Lessons From the Automobile Reorganizations"

[Bill Reynolds]

Matthew--maybe it should have been "Lemons from the Automobile reorgs."

[Mary Dudziak]

There should be a sub-genre of Mark Tushnet's best titles. I'd include his review of Laurence Tribe, American Constitutional Law in the 1980 Michigan Law Rev: "Dia-Tribe."

[Bill Turnier]

This is a good time of year to revisit "The Common Law Origins of the Infield Fly Rule" which starts out by stating "The infield fly rule is neither a rule of law nor of equity,"

[AnonVAP]

What is the view on the prime window to submit for the fall cycle? There must be threads on this, but I can't find them.

[fruitless]

David Frakt's "Fruitless Poisonous Trees in a Parallel Universe: Hudson v. Michigan, Knock-and-Announce and the Exclusionary Rule" is a clever dismantling of Scalia's majority opinion. 34 Fla St U L. Rev 659 or here at
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2103817

[Matt Sawchak]

When I was an editor in the late 1980s, I saw an article about organ procurement with the title (before the inevitable colon): She's Got Bette Davis['] Eyes.

Still cracks me up, 23 years later.