Harvard Law Review
The Harvard Law Review is a journal of legal scholarship published by an independent student group at Harvard Law School.
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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 term. The review has a circulation of about 8,000 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 Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, and the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 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 prompting of Louis Brandeis, 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), and its first black president was Sen. Barack Obama (1991).
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., as well as Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Charles Hamilton Houston, Alger Hiss, Archibald MacLeish, Senator Barack Obama, Judge Richard Posner, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Chris Cox, New York state attorney general Eliot Spitzer, Harvard Law Dean Elena Kagan, Yale Law Dean Harold Koh, and once-and-future Harvard University president Derek Bok.
Significant Harvard Law Review articles
External links
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