About

The Northwestern University Law Review is a student-operated journal that publishes six issues of high-quality, general legal scholarship each year. Student editors make the editorial and organizational decisions and select articles submitted by professors, judges, and practitioners, as well as student pieces.

First published in 1906, the Law Review has been distinguished by the scholarly qualifications and variety of its participants. Prior Editors-in-Chief include: Roscoe Pound, long-time dean of Harvard Law School; Judge Robert A. Sprecher of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit; Justice John Paul Stevens; Dean James A. Rahl; Governor Daniel Walker; and Newton N. Minow, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Other editorial officers have included Justice Arthur Goldberg and Adlai E. Stevenson.

The equally distinguished list of contributors to the Law Review includes Dean Leon Green, Sir William Holdsworth, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Albert M. Kales, Nathan William MacChesney, Charles T. McCormick, Sir Frederick Pollock, Dean Roscoe Pound, Dean John Henry Wigmore, Justice Felix Frankfurter, Justice Tom Clark, Justice William O. Douglas, Justice Abe Fortas, Chief Judge Harry T. Edwards, Erwin Griswold, Archibald Cox, Paul Freund, W. Willard Wirtz, Albert Ehrenzweig, H.L.A. Hart, Gerald Gunther, Edward H. Levi, Hubert H. Humphrey, Brunson MacChesney, Nathaniel Nathanson, Dean James A. Rahl, Dean (now professor) David Ruder, Martin Redish, Kenneth Culp Davis, Raoul Berger, Bernard Schwartz, Ian Macneil, John Coffee, Gary Lawson, Mary Becker, Stephen Schulhofer, Nadine Strossen, Judge José A. Cabranes, Judge Richard Posner, Cass Sunstein, and many others. Beyond the Law Review’s traditional legal scholarship, it has published contributions from noted philosopher F.S.C. Northrop, the Right Reverend James A. Pike, Earl Stanley Gardner, and J. Edgar Hoover.

In addition to individual contributions, the Law Review has a proud history of special symposium issues on a broad range of important topics. Recent symposium issues have included: The Law-Stem Alliance and Next Generation Innovation (2016); Democratizing Criminal Law (2016); McCleskey v. Kemp (2017); Originalism (2018); and Rethinking Solitary Confinement (2019), the Second Amendment’s Next Chapter (2020); Reimagining Property in the Era of Inequality (2021); and Fraud and the Erosion of Trust (2022).