Stanford Law Review

The Stanford Law Review (SLR) is a legal journal produced independently by Stanford Law School students. The journal was established in 1948 with future U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher as its first president. The review produces six issues yearly between January and June and regularly publishes short-form content on the Stanford Law Review Online.

Admissions

The Stanford Law Review selects members based on a competitive exercise that tests candidates on their editing skills and legal writing ability. There is not a firm number of accepted candidates each year; recent classes of new editors have ranged from about 40 to 45. The candidate exercise is distributed to candidates late in their first year at the law school. Transfer students are also eligible for admission through the same process.

Notable alumni

The review's editorial board has a president, who is effectively the editor-in-chief of the publication. The current president is Brittany Jones. Notable past presidents include Warren Christopher (1949),Brooksley E. Born (1964), Raymond C. Fisher (1966), David F. Levi (1980), Paul G. Cassell (1984), and Tony West (1990). Other notable alumni are William Rehnquist, Sandra Day O'Connor, Joshua Bolten, Carlos Watson, and Peter Thiel.

Stanford Law School

Stanford Law School (also known as Stanford Law or SLS) is a professional graduate school of Stanford University, located in the Silicon Valley near Palo Alto, California. Established in 1893, Stanford Law is currently ranked by U.S. News & World Report as the second best law school in the United States and has been ranked as one of the top three law schools (with Yale Law School and Harvard Law School) every year since 1992.

Stanford Law School employs more than 70 full-time and part-time faculty members and enrolls over 500 students who are working toward their Doctor of Jurisprudence (J.D.) degree. Stanford Law also confers four advanced legal degrees: a Master of Laws (LL.M.), a Master of Studies in Law (M.S.L.), a Master of the Science of Law (J.S.M.), and a Doctor of the Science of Law (J.S.D.). Each fall, Stanford Law enrolls a J.D. class of approximately 180 students, giving Stanford the smallest student body of any law school ranked in the top fourteen (T14). Stanford also maintains eleven full-time legal clinics, including the nation's first and most active Supreme Court litigation clinic, and offers 27 formal joint degree programs.

Law review

A law review (or law journal) is a scholarly journal focusing on legal issues, normally published by an organization of students at a law school or through a bar association. The term is also used to describe the extracurricular activity at law schools of publishing the journal.

Law reviews should not be confused with non-scholarly publications such as the New York Law Journal or The American Lawyer, which are independent, professional newspapers and news-magazines that cover the daily practice of law (see legal periodical).

Overview

The primary function of a law review is to publish scholarship in the field of law. Law reviews publish lengthy, comprehensive treatments of subjects ("articles"), generally written by law professors, judges, or legal practitioners, as well as shorter pieces, commonly called "notes" and "comments," written by law student "members" of the law review.

Law review articles often express the thinking of specialists or experts with regard to problems with current law and potential solutions to those problems. Historically, law review articles have been influential in the development of the law; they have been frequently cited as persuasive authority by the courts in the United States. For example, Justice Stanley Mosk of the Supreme Court of California admitted that he got the idea for market share liability from the Fordham Law Review article cited extensively in the Court's landmark decision in Sindell v. Abbott Laboratories (1980). However, in recent years, some have claimed that the traditional influence of law reviews is declining.