The Harvard Law Review is a journal of legal scholarship published by an independent student group at Harvard Law School.

Overview

The Review is one of the most cited law reviews in the United States and considered by many to be the most prestigious. It is published monthly from November through June, with the November issue dedicated to covering the previous year's Supreme Court Term. The review has a circulation of about 8,000,^[1] and also publishes online. In addition, it publishes the online-only Harvard Law Review Forum, a rolling journal of scholarly responses to the main journal's content.

The Harvard Law Review Association, in conjunction with the Columbia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal, publishes The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, the most widely followed authority for legal citation formats in the United States.

History

The Harvard Law Review published its first issue on April 15, 1887, and is the oldest operating student-edited law review in the nation. The establishment of this institution was largely due to the support of Louis Brandeis, then a recent Harvard Law School alumnus and Boston attorney who would later go on to become a Justice on the United States Supreme Court. The first woman to serve as the Review's president was Democratic political operative Susan Estrich (1978); its first black president was future Senator Barack Obama (1991).^[2] The recently elected Andrew Crespo (2008) was the first Hispanic president.^[3]

The Harvard Law Review headquarters, Gannett House, is located on the Harvard Law School campus. It is an elegant white building done in the Greek Revival style that was popular in New England during the mid- to late 1800s. Before moving into Gannett House in 1925, the Harvard Law Review resided in the Law School's Austin Hall.

Selection

Using a competitive process that takes into account first-year grades, an editing exercise, and a written commentary on a court decision, The Harvard Law Review selects between 41 and 43 editors annually from the second-year Law School class, which numbers 560.

Two editors from each of first-year class's seven sections (fourteen in all) are selected half by their first year grades and half by their scores on the writing competition. Another twenty are selected solely on their scores on the writing competition. The other seven to nine are selected by a discretionary committee, either to fulfill the review's race-based affirmative action program, to select students who just missed the cut by either of the other two processes, or by some other criteria as the committee sees fit.

Alumni

Prominent alumni of the Harvard Law Review include Supreme Court Justices Edward Sanford, Felix Frankfurter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, Stephen Breyer and Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., Presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Charles Hamilton Houston, Alger Hiss, Archibald MacLeish, Secretary of Transportation and Brown v. Board of Education attorney William Coleman, Jr., Judge Richard Posner, Chief Judge Henry Friendly, Chief Judge Michael Boudin, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Chris Cox, print and broadcast journalist Jeffrey Toobin, former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan, Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh, former Canadian ambassador Allan Gotlieb, former Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh, former New York State Solicitor General Preeta D. Bansal, University of Texas President William C. Powers, and former Harvard University president Derek Bok.

Significant Harvard Law Review articles

References

External links

• Harvard Law Review homepage
• ''Harvard Law Review Forum''
• History of the Harvard Law Review

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