This article has been viewed times since February 5, 1996. At first glance, this contention might seem implausible - after all, the law review is the supreme institution of the contemporary American legal academy. Law schools depend upon law reviews for publicity and prestige. Law professors depend upon law reviews for publication and promotion.
Law students depend upon law reviews for education and employment.
The law review, however, is hardly an inevitable institution. It emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the product of the fortuitous interaction of academic circumstances and improvements in publishing technology. In this article, I undertake a comprehensive re-assessment of the law review from the perspective of the present age of cyberspace. In Part I , I begin this re-assessment by investigating the academic and technological conditions that initially joined to generate the form. In the Conclusion to this article, I consider what legal scholars, law school Deans and faculties, the Association of American Law Schools and even the editors of law reviews themselves might do to accelerate or at least accommodate the transition to the proposed system of electronic self-publication.