The First Century: Celebrating 100 Years of Legal Scholarship (2006)

FOREWORD When the Illinois Law Review was launched exactly one hundred years ago, the first order of business was to justify its existence. As Professors Dawn Clark Netsch and Harold D. Shapiro recount in their delightful history of what is now known as the Northwestern University Law Review-the essay that serves as the centerpiece of this centennial symposium issue-by 1906 the Harvard Law Review had been publishing for nearly two decades, The Yale Law Journal for fifteen years, the Columbia Law Review for five, and the University of Michigan Law Review for four. All of these journals were mere infants when compared with the American Law Register, which was founded in 1852 and gradually evolved into today's University of Pennsylvania Law Review.1 With these five journals in operation, the field for general law reviews was already overcrowded, according to the Illinois Law Review's first editors.2 And so in what now looks to us like a savvy marketing ploy, those editorial pioneers cast the Illinois Law Review as something of a niche journal, focused on a different set of legal issues than its peers. Writing in the Law Review's first editorial note, the editors make clear that their peer journals, however excellent, enlist the interest of but a small minority of the practicing lawyers of Illinois. It is believed, however, that there is genuine and widespread need of a live periodical primarily devoted to the discussion and exposition of Illinois law, and of matters of special practical value to the Illinois bar. In that belief, and with the purpose of supplying that need, this Review is launched.3 Such were the deceptively modest beginnings of the Illinois Law Review. What that first editorial note masks, though, is the zeal and ambition of this Law Review's two principal founders, General Nathan William MacChesney and Dean John Henry Wigmore. As Netsch and Shapiro vividly describe, the two men conceptualized and created the Illinois Law Review in a mere four months. In early February 1906, a faculty committee was formed to assess the feasibility of launching a law review; in early May of that same year, the first issue of the Illinois Law Review rolled off the presses. Clearly, the committee had deemed the task feasible.4 Dean Wigmore did more than just help launch the Law Review. During that first year, he was one of the journal's most frequent contributors, authoring or co-authoring two articles, eleven case comments, and four editorial notes.9 One of those articles resurfaces in the pages of this symposium issue as Professor Robert P. Bums revisits Wigmore's first contribution, Some Evidence Statutes That Illinois Ought to Have.6 One hundred years later, it appears, Dean Wigmore-to whom this volume is dedicated-still has something to say. As does his journal. Today the Illinois Law Review not only survives but thrives in what is still considered an overcrowded field of law reviews. (Estimates vary, but there are anywhere from 500 to 1000 law reviews, both general and specialty, in circulation today.)7 Renamed the Northwestern University Law Review in 1952 by an editorial board led by Netsch and Shapiro, the journal that was once steeped in Illinois law and legal issues is now considerably broader in scope, featuring articles with national and international appeal. There have been other changes as well. Nine relatively slim issues per volume have been replaced by four relatively heftier ones. Gone are the years-from 1924 to 1932-when Northwestern's Law Review was a cooperative enterprise, a product of the joint efforts of law students and faculty from Northwestern, the University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois. Further, our Law Review has not proven immune to the onward march of technology; in fact, the last five years have probably seen more changes to the world of legal scholarship than the last hundred. Our readers today are far more likely to review a journal article after downloading it from the Internet than they are to page through a hard copy. …