Essay: A Ham Sandwich

Abstract

This essay is a short (approximately 1400 words, including footnotes) and to the point humorous indictment of the present scholarship (articles and journals) within the American legal academy. Nonetheless, the issue raised by this essay is a serious one – that the proliferation of journals and articles is threatening to overwhelm the system’s ability to discern good from bad scholarship. The same issue is happening with the proliferation of judicial opinions. The essay notes that these issues are neither new (the Roman legal system encountered similar issues) nor confined to the United States (e.g., the English have recently handled a comparable issue with respect to judicial opinion citations). The essay concludes by recommending the legal Academy reconsider the present version of student run and edited law reviews.