Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2000

Abstract

Somewhere, in the mythic past of Langdell and Stone, a few good men decided to create a journal with unpaid student laborers in order to free their time and allow professors to concentrate on outside consulting without having to support their arguments or check their cites. This tradition continues to this day.
—Columbia Law Review Banquet Issue, 1991

I'm quite fond of that account of the origins of law reviews, but, alas, the truth is less colorful. Harvard, as we know, was first-in, truly, the Langdellian past – and there, as everywhere to follow, the Review was the result of student initiative. A certain intellectual restiveness, a sense of needing more than is provided by their school's formal curriculum – a phenomenon familiar enough to us today – appears to have beset law students from the beginning. The most interesting example of this that I know of is found at the Columbia Law School in the late nineteenth century: From 1886 to 189[1?], apparently at the instance of students, a series of lectures on Norman French was given for those students who wanted to be able to read the medieval Year Books in the original. As Julius Goebel drily remarks, "Since [1891], students who have desired to delve in medieval law books have had to learn the language elsewhere." Professor Goebel would have been acutely aware – none better – that he described a small, latterly I should think null, class, but many thousands of law students over the century have indeed sought something of an intellectually satisfying nature beyond their prescribed studies.

Disciplines

Law | Legal History | Legal Writing and Research

Comments

This article originally appeared in 1 Colum. L. Rev. 1 (2000). Reprinted by permission.

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