Mrs. Lincoln's Lawyer's Cat: The Future of Legal Scholarship

Abstract

"Mrs. Lincoln's Lawyer's Cat," which appeared in the online companion to the Connecticut Law Review, CONNtemplations, begins with a discussion of the role that law reviews occupy in their parent institutions and it explores the correlations between citations to law schools' main reviews and the most recent US News rankings (2008). It is part of a symposium on law reviews and, thus, continues a discussion with Ronen Perry and others, which began in the Connecticut Law Review in 2006. The brief essay then turns to literature on "the history of the book" to suggest some of the reasons why we might draw inferences about a law school from the contents of its review. Finally, it turns to a discussion of the role that law reviews and the internet may play in propagating legal knowledge, as financial pressures make it harder to publish books.

Keywords: law review, citations, legal scholarship, book publishing, history of the book