Last writes? The law review in the age of cyberspace

This article reassesses the history and future of the law review in light of changing technological and academic conditions. It analyzes why law reviews developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and describes how three different waves of criticism have reflected shifting professorial, professional and pedagogical concerns about the genre. Recent editorial reforms and the inauguration of on-line services and electronic law journals appear to solve some of the law review's traditional problems, but the author suggests that these procedural and technological modifications leave the basic criticisms of the law review system unmet. In this context, the author proposes that legal writers self-publish on the World Wide Web, as he has done in an extended version of the present piece. This strategy would give legal writers more control over the substance and form of their scholarship, would create more opportunities for spontaneity and creativity, and would promote more direct dialogue between legal thinkers.