May It Please the Court: A Longitudinal Study of Judicial Citation to Academic Legal Periodicals

Abstract

Abstract Part I of this article examines the proportion of reported opinions from U.S. federal and state courts between 1945 and 2018 that cite at least one academic legal periodical, while Part II applies that data beginning in 1970 to compare the proportion of opinions that cite to the flagship journals of 17 law schools selected and hierarchically categorized based on their U.S. News & World Reports rankings. Representing the most elite schools are Harvard Law Review and Yale Law Journal, the two longest running student-edited journals 1 at arguably the two most prestigious law schools in the United States, 2 followed by journals from three exemplar schools from the “Top 14,” and three law schools from each of the rankings' four tiers. This article explores these trends in the context of changes in technology, the judiciary, legal scholarship, and academic legal publishing.