On Citing Law Reviews

With forty-five years of legal practice under my belt, I paused for a moment as I was working on a new brief to think about the enterprise that has been my career. My new brief covers an issue I had never encountered before in an area of law that was new to me. I certainly enjoyed getting to know the law in this area, hoping that my understanding is solid and not a misreading of the cases and historical background. And it is the opportunity to discover new things and apply my perspective to it that keeps me going.

As with any brief, this one is being written with an eye to its audience. In this case, that means the justices of the Supreme Court. I know that what may play well with one justice may be off-putting to another. Thinking about that, I recalled remarks that Justice Ginsburg once gave at the University of South Carolina.

 She advised that a “brief skips long quotations, but doesn't unfairly crop the occasional quotations used to highlight key points.”[1] Every judge I know agrees with that statement. However, she made another that day, which may not be universally shared. She said, a “good brief does not shy away from citing law review commentaries or other scholarly analyses that may aid the court as much as they did the brief writer to get an overview of the area.”[2] As a former law professor, she had a natural interest in scholarly work.

However, an interest in law reviews is not universally shared by judges. Chief Justice Roberts once said that “as a general matter, law reviews are not―particularly helpful for practitioners and judges.[3] Roberts later made a similar point when he challenged judges in the Fourth Circuit to pick up a law review, where they are likely to see that the first article is likely to be an esoteric article “of great interest to the academic that wrote it, but isn’t of much help to the bar.[4]

A 2012 study of the frequency with which justices cited law review articles concluded that citations had fallen off from earlier eras and that 40 percent of the articles cited were written by people who were not full-time academics.[5]

Certainly, all articles are not of equal value. Some cover the history with precision and diligence that will help where that is at issue. Others conduct a survey of the law of various states that also provides useful fodder for a brief. However, where the law review article is more philosophical or theoretical, it may have limited value. Those quick thoughts suggest that law reviews are most helpful when they provide practical information that supports the argument you are making. When the article provides that type of information, the judge need not sit on the Supreme Court to approve of its use in a brief. Keep that in mind when the issue requires more than an analysis of a law, rule, or trial record.

 

[1] Hon. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Remarks on Appellate Advocacy, 50 S. C. L. Rev. 567, 568 (1999).

[2] Id.

[3] Quoted in Brent E. Newton, Law Review Scholarship in the Eyes of the Twenty-First-Century Supreme Court Justices: An Empirical Analysis, 4 Drexel L. Rev. 399, 399 (2012).

[4] Id. at 399 n.1.

[5] Id. at 416.