From the Mouths of Babes

Alarmed at the new age of prying photographers and gossip columnists, the two young Boston lawyers warned that "the question of whether our law will recognize and protect the right to privacy must soon come before our courts."

Written in 1890, that prophecy of Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis (later a Supreme Court Justice) signaled a new doctrine in U.S. law. Significantly, it was argued not in court but in the Harvard Law Review, then three years old and the pioneer of a new kind of learned journal that no other profession yet boasts.

The country's 100-odd law reviews are wholly run by the aristocrats of U.S. law schools--fearsomely bright students who toil around the clock polishing deep-think articles that influence U.S. law right up to the Supreme Court. "Nowadays a case doesn't reach the end of the line with the Supreme Court," says one admiring law professor. "The last resort is what the law reviews say they think about it."

Legaldygook. Such presumptuousness would appall other professions, and some lawyers pooh-pooh the whole idea. The average law review, scoffs Yale's iconoclastic Law Professor Fred Rodell, "sounds like a 33-r.p.m. disk played at 78," a cacophony of "turgid, legaldy-gooky garbage." Nonetheless, law reviews--most notably those published by Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Stanford and Yale--are more influential than ever. A law-review job shapes a man's entire later life. Usually tapped at the end of freshman year, recruits are chosen by the outgoing editorial staff purely on the basis of class rank. Only the top 5% to 10% make it. They have every reason to try. For "law-review men" get the country's top law jobs, from Supreme Court clerkships to big-firm slots at starting salaries of $7,500 or more.

New staffers often slave 14 hours a day during summer vacation to research a debut article of three to five pages, knowing well that top editors will do their best to rip it apart. In his two years on the law review, a staffer can expect to write only about three pieces, though he will spend several hundred hours checking other writers' sources. On graduation, however, he has the most impeccable credentials: the case-hardened polish of a law-review man.

Research into Law. Law reviews--most of them written half by students, half by guest professionals--provide instant research for lawyers drafting briefs, judges writing opinions and convicts honing appeals. California's 1959 overhaul of juvenile courts owed much to a study in the Stanford Law Review. The Supreme Court's 1958 liberalization of passport procedures (Kent v. Dulles) reflected views from the Yale Law Journal, and its 1963 support of court-appointed counsel for indigent defendants (Gideon v. Wainwrighf) cited an eloquent article in the Chicago Law Review. Chicago's Law Dean Phil C. Neal says flatly: "The preponderance of legal research originates in the law reviews."

Law reviews usually come in three main parts: concise student case summaries, deeper student analyses of legal problems, longer professional articles that often break new ground. Most top reviews come out eight times a year; all bristle with ferocious footnotes reflecting the most intense passion for precision. Beyond these similarities, the reviews differ in tone and emphasis. Samples:

> Harvard's big (10,813 subscribers) review is the most widely read and probably the most prestigious. Like all their counterparts, but maybe more so, Harvard's editors are sticklers for detail, specialize in clarifying "what the law is," typically dug out the dusty minutes of an 1815 bank officers' meeting last winter in order to verify one quote. Among Harvard's star sticklers: the late Robert A. Taft, Dean Acheson, Alger Hiss, Justice Felix Frankfurter, Yale's new President Kingman Brewster Jr.

> Chicago's young (1933) quarterly reaches boldly outside the law for such contributors as Economist Friedrich A. von Hayek and Physicist Leo Szilard. Proving that youth is no barrier to getting elders' ears, Chicago's review has been cited in at least ten recent Supreme Court decisions covering everything from prayer to pornography. Among its still-young ex-editors: Connecticut's Senator Abraham Ribicoff, who served on the first edition.

> Columbia's 3,700 subscribers get a review that is well attuned to New York law and a delight to big Manhattan law firms. A prime source of their recruits, Columbia also produced the late Justices Cardozo, Hughes, Reed and Stone, as well as the current court's Justice Douglas.

> Stanford's infant (1948) quarterly is high on punchy prose, has broken new ground ever since Volume I probed the legalities of rainmaking in a piece titled "Who Owns the Clouds?" Later it debunked Alger Hiss's contention that a "second" typewriter was used to frame him. In 1963 it examined the high-priced funeral industry well before Author Jessica Mitford's bestseller on the subject. Too new to have many famed alumni--Idaho's Senator Frank Church is one--the Stanford review this year boasts a girl president, Brooksley Born, 22, whose law-school grade average is 3.97 out of a possible 4.0.

> Yale's offbeat review (2,600 subscribers) claims to "begin where Harvard leaves off"--on the "frontier" of law and social policy. Scornful of big-name contributors, it once rejected an article by the dean of the Yale law school, seeks "adventurous" pieces by its own staff, such as a recent scathing study of Kennedy appointees to Southern federal courts. Last week the new issue probed anti-Semitism in big New York law firms, found them far more willing to hire Jews than a decade ago. (A remaining barrier: the "common knowledge" of Jews that they have no chance.) Almost uniquely willing to hazard humor, Yale's review once printed a hilarious analysis of Connecticut's birth-control law showing that it prohibits oral contraceptives for dogs so that bitches may have "the most intimate and sacred experiences in life."

Better Than School. Because of their extracurricular frenzy, law-review men are often unprepared in class. On the other hand, the reward for their work on the reviews, as Yale's outgoing Editor in Chief Peter Strauss typically describes it, is "the most intellectually exciting experience of my life." Says another editor: "I wrote one note on parole laws and it was worth seven courses in criminal law." Not surprisingly, law schools are now straining to give all students a touch of law-review experience by requiring far more independent research. "Law reviews are by far the best training that any American law school can offer," sums up Yale's Law Dean Eugene V. Rostow. "Their educational value is unmatched by anything in the law schools themselves."

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