Seventh Circuit Judge Richard Posner takes dead aim at law review articles in this Legal Affairs article, and the hilarious sub-headline sums up his viewpoint:

Welcome to a world where inexperienced editors make articles about the wrong topics worse.

Any article by Judge Posner is well worth reading and this one is no exception. He notes the result of the system of law review articles:

The result of the system of scholarly publication in law is that too many articles are too long, too dull, and too heavily annotated, and that many interdisciplinary articles are published that have no merit at all. Worse is the effect of these characteristics of law reviews in marginalizing the kind of legal scholarship that student editors can handle well?articles that criticize judicial decisions or, more constructively, discern new directions in law by careful analysis of decisions. Such articles are of great value to the profession, including its judicial branch, but they are becoming rare, in part because of the fascination of the legal academy with constitutional law, which in fact plays only a small role in the decisions of the lower courts. Law reviews do extensively analyze and criticize the constitutional decisions of the Supreme Court, but the profession, including the judiciary, would benefit from a reorientation of academic attention to lower-court decisions. Not that the Supreme Court isn’t the most important court in the United States. But the 80 or so decisions that it renders every year get disproportionate attention compared to the many thousands of decisions rendered by other appellate courts that are much less frequently written about, especially since justices of the Supreme Court are the judges who are least likely to be influenced by critical academic reflection on their work.

Read the entire article. Also, U.T. Law Prof Brian Leiter has some interesting comments on Judge Posner’s views.