Babies, Bathwater, and Law Reviews

There is more than meets the eye with the decades old debate about the worth of law reviews-or less.' From Fred Rodell's polemic to the present, there has been a consistent clamor for the abolition of the hated law reviews and their imperious stewards, the despised law review editors.2 Even a friend and faculty colleague, who is the former editor-in-chief of the California Law Review (but who will remain unnamed), states in no uncertain terms that law reviews are "boring and mostly a waste."3 The thought expressed by my colleague is not new. John Henry Schlegel essentially described legal scholarship as an "open scandal" characterized by a "boring sameness."4 The enmity which exists within the academy between the professoriate and the law reviews