Yale Law Journal

The Yale Law Journal is a student-run law review affiliated with the Yale Law School. Published continuously since 1891, it is the most widely known of the eight law reviews published by students at Yale Law School. The journal is one of the most cited legal publications in the nation and usually generates the highest number of citations per published article.

The journal, which is published eight times per year, contains articles, essays, features, and book reviews by professional legal scholars as well as student-written notes and comments. It is edited entirely by students. The journal has an online companion, the Yale Law Journal Online, which features op-ed length pieces and responses from scholars, practitioners, and policymakers. Prior to 2009, the Yale Law Journal Online was known as The Pocket Part.

The Yale Law Journal, in conjunction with the Harvard Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, and the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, publishes the Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, the most widely followed authority for legal citation formats in the United States.

Yale Law School

Yale Law School (often referred to as Yale Law or YLS) is the law school of Yale University, located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. The school's small size and prestige make its admissions process the most selective of any law school in the United States. Established in 1824, Yale Law offers the J.D., LL.M., J.S.D., M.S.L., and Ph.D. degrees in law. Yale Law has been ranked the number one law school in the country by U.S. News and World Report every year since the magazine began publishing law school rankings.

Yale Law has produced a large number of luminaries in law and politics, including United States Presidents Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton. The law school's Lillian Goldman Law Library has been memorialized as the meeting place of Bill Clinton and fellow student Hillary Clinton, the 67th Secretary of State and announced candidate for President of the United States. Former President William Howard Taft was a professor of constitutional law at Yale Law School from 1913 until he resigned to become Chief Justice of the United States in 1921. Alumni also include current United States Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Sonia Sotomayor, as well as a number of former Justices, including Abe Fortas, Potter Stewart and Byron White; several heads of state around the world, including Karl Carstens, the fifth President of Germany, and Jose P. Laurel, the president of the Republic of the Philippines; four current U.S. Senators, and the current deans of six of the top fourteen-ranked law schools in the United States: Yale, Harvard, Chicago, Virginia, Cornell, and Georgetown.

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.