The Boston College Law Review is the oldest scholarly publication at Boston College Law School. The Review publishes articles concerning legal issues of national interest. The Review publishes five issues each year that include articles and essays written by prominent outside authors, such as Professor Vikram David Amar, Professor Herbert Hovenkamp, and Professor Jeremy Waldron. The following provides an example of the Review’s range of subject matter:
- In their March 2012 essay, Rehnquist’s Missing Letter: A Former Law Clerk’s 1955 Thoughts on Justice Jackson and Brown, Brad Snyder and John Q. Barrett examined a newly discovered letter from Justice William Rehnquist to Justice Felix Frankfurter, which reveals Rehnquist’s true thoughts about Brown v. Board of Education and Justice Robert Jackson. The New York Times praised Snyder and Barrett’s essay for “draw[ing] some stinging conclusions.”
- In his article Plausibility Pleading, published in the March 2008 issue of the Review, A. Benjamin Spencer critiqued the U.S. Supreme Court’s reinterpretation of Rule 8′s pleading standard in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly. Spencer’s paper was the third most cited law review article of 2008, according to a study published by Michigan Law Review in June 2012.
- Martha Minow‘s article Should Religious Groups Be Exempt from Civil Rights Laws?, published by the Review in September 2007, identified avenues for negotiating solutions to religious exemptions other than full exemptions or no exemptions at all.
In addition to articles written by outside academics, the Review prints the work of its student staff writers, many of whom publish notes during their third year. Recent editions have contained student notes examining such diverse issues as tipper/tippee liability under the misappropriation theory of insider trading, plea bargains struck under the threat of enemy combatant detention, and balancing women’s reproductive rights against a pharmacist’s conscientious objection. The Review’s second-year staff members also prepare short comments on recent federal circuit court decisions, which may be published in the Review’s electronic supplement. The Review also organizes, sponsors, and publishes articles from academic symposia. The 2012 symposium was entitled “Filling Power Vacuums in the New Global Legal Order.”
