Harvard Law Review

The Harvard Law Review is a student-run legal journal produced by an independent organization at Harvard Law School. Its first issue came out on April 15, 1887, making it one of the oldest continuously operating student-edited law reviews in the country. Louis Brandeis, a recent Harvard Law graduate and Boston lawyer who later served on the U.S. Supreme Court, was instrumental in getting it started. The journal comes out monthly from November to June, and the November issue each year covers the Supreme Court’s most recent term. It also runs the Harvard Law Review Forum, an online-only publication that features scholarly responses to articles from the main journal.

According to the 2015 Journal Citation Reports, the Harvard Law Review had an impact factor of 4.979, ranking first out of 143 journals in the “Law” category. It also holds the top spot in other law review rankings. The review is one of three honors societies at the law school, alongside the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau and the Board of Student Advisors. Students selected for more than one of these groups can only join one. Together with the Columbia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal, the Harvard Law Review Association publishes *The Bluebook*, the standard guide for legal citation in the United States.

From the 1880s through the 1970s, editors were chosen based on grades, and the student with the highest academic rank became president. Priscilla Holmes was the first female editor, serving from 1953 to 1955. Susan Estrich became the first female president in 1977; she later entered Democratic politics and became the youngest woman to earn tenure at Harvard Law School. Raj Marphatia, the first non-white ethnic minority president, led volume 101 in 1988 and is now a partner at Ropes & Gray in Boston. Barack Obama, the 44th U.S. president, was the first African-American president in 1991. Mitchell Reich was the first openly gay president in 2011, and Andrew M. Crespo, now a tenured Harvard Law professor, was the first Latino president. ImeIme Umana became the first female African-American president in 2017.

Since the 1920s, the review has been housed in Gannett House, a white Greek Revival building typical of mid-to-late 19th-century New England architecture. Before that, it was located in the law school’s Austin Hall. After a change in selection criteria in the 1970s, grades are no longer the primary factor. Membership is now offered to Harvard law students based on first-year grades and a writing competition held at the end of the first year, except for twelve slots that are discretionary. The competition involves editing an unpublished article and analyzing a recent U.S. Supreme Court or Court of Appeals case, with submissions graded blindly. Fourteen editors (two from each first-year section) are chosen based on a combination of grades and competition scores. Twenty editors are selected solely on competition scores, and the remaining twelve are discretionary. According to the review’s website, “Some of these discretionary slots may be used to implement the Review’s affirmative action policy.” The president is elected by the other editors.

Since the first issue, student works published in the review have been called “notes” and are unsigned, reflecting the policy that many editors contribute to each piece. In 2012, the Harvard Law Review had 1,722 paid subscriptions.

In November 2023, the review stopped publication of “The Ongoing Nakba: Towards a Legal Framework for Palestine,” a short commissioned essay by Rabea Eghbariah, a Palestinian Harvard Law student. The online chairs had asked Eghbariah to write a blog post. *The Intercept* reported that the review’s president, Apsara Iyer, with support from a majority of the leadership, delayed publication due to “safety concerns and the desire to deliberate with editors.” The review ultimately did not publish the post. It later appeared in *The Nation* in November and in *The Harbinger* of the N.Y.U. Review of Law & Social Change in December. Twenty-five editors objected, calling the decision “an unprecedented decision [that] threatens academic freedom and perpetuates the suppression of Palestinian voices.” The following spring, Eghbariah expanded the essay into a full law review article, “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept,” published in the Columbia Law Review, where administrative attempts to suppress it also occurred but were ultimately unsuccessful.

Notable alumni include President Barack Obama, who served as president of volume 104. Supreme Court justices who served as editors include Stephen Breyer (articles editor, volume 77), Felix Frankfurter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg (editor for one year before transferring to Columbia), Ketanji Brown Jackson (supervising editor, volume 109), Elena Kagan (supervising editor, volume 99), John G. Roberts Jr. (managing editor, volume 92), Antonin Scalia (notes editor, volume 73), and Edward Sanford. Other jurists include David J. Barron, a judge.