Yale Law Review Moves Step Away From ‘Traditional Dullness’

Prevailing traditions at the Yale Law Journal have always lent its pages an air of academic monasticism, the appropriate stylelessness for sophisticated subscribers.

With the July issue, however, the discerning eye will see a distinct change. Of course, the language retains the same clanging formality, and, between covers, the unillustrated pages remain as gray as headstones. But the footnotes?

Your honor, we offer evidence of a creeping interest in life outside the cloister:

(3) “L.A. Law” (NBC television broadcast, Jan. 12, 1989).

(12) supra note 3, see Stark, “Perry Mason Meets Sonny Crockett.”

(19) S. Turow, “Presumed Innocent” (1987).

(35) B. Berger & R. Martinez, “What to Do With a Dead Lawyer” (1988, cartoons); “Skid Marks: Common Jokes About Lawyers” (Michael Rafferty ed. 1988).

Ed Swaine, formerly an editor of the Harvard Lampoon, admits to aiding and abetting in crimes against tradition. When he became this year’s editor in chief of the journal, he envisioned a hologram on the cover, a pop-up in the center spread, a crossword puzzle, courtroom cartoons, and a bibliography of films and television shows about the profession.

The result is a restrained, overtly serious version of his madcap fancies. But Swaine and his editors have produced a journal that they believe befits the top shelf of any lawyer’s bathroom collection (costs prohibited it from having a leather binding, said Swaine, whose ambition once was to produce the journal’s first coffee-table edition).

Vol. 98, No. 8, is all about law and popular culture, and its premise is simple: “Many law professors experience vertigo when they open the doors and look outside appellate courtrooms,” writes Prof. Stewart Macaulay of the University of Wisconsin in the introductory essay. “The functioning American legal system involves much that many law professors want to deny. If we mustered our courage and lifted our eyes from the pages of appellate reports and books written by famous dead Europeans, what might we see? Large areas of life are subject to private police, private rule-making and the sanctions generated by long-term continuing relationships.”

There is, essentially, as much to be discovered about the law and lawyers by watching television as by combing Supreme Court dicta.

Thus: A freewheeling symposium on “The Depiction of Law in ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities,’ ” “Taking ‘L.A. Law’ More Seriously,” “An L.A. Lawyer Replies,” “Law, Lawyers and Popular Culture.”

“It still looks like a law review,” said Swaine, now an attorney with the solicitor general’s office in Washington. “It has footnotes. The topics are written by legal scholars, and they don’t betray a respect for legal scholarship. It would attempt to accomplish minor shifts in three areas: the conduct of law reviews themselves, the subject matter for legal academics and a refocus of attention outside the ivory towers.

“It doesn’t represent a sea change in attitude. But it may give vent to the ever-present spirit of subversiveness,” Swaine said.

The spirit of subversiveness has its own tradition at the law school, whose journal boasts 4,000 subscribers--second only in circulation to the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy--among university-based law reviews.

Trend-watchers might wonder whether there is a subtle shift in the paradigm of law review editors nationwide. In 1987, for instance, the University of Miami Law Review printed “Perry Mason Meets Sonny Crockett: The History of Lawyers and the Police as Television Heroes.” And in the past decade, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review published a parody on “The Common Law Origins of the Infield Fly Rule.”

Nonetheless, the editors are circumspect when confronted with the central question: “Is the Yale Law Journal Loosening Up?”

“I guess it depends on what you mean by loosening up,” replied Larry Garvin, the journal’s managing editor, who also works in Washington for a private firm. “From the issues that we published before this, the answer would really have to be, probably, no. That’s a qualified no.

“Law journals seem to me to be moving a step or two away from their traditional dullness. Let me retract that word--their traditional form. Dullness is a matter of taste.”

“Most have a comments section with shorter pieces, with fewer footnotes and more snappily written pieces and often addressing subjects of current interest. And I think that, generally, law journals will be moving in that direction--shorter articles and fewer footnotes.”

“Part of it comes because of the way law journals work. The students, after all, have to check every blasted footnote, and this is not one of the most pleasant jobs in editing. This is also unusual as far as scholarship goes. I don’t know why in law we have especially high standards and can’t trust the people who write for us. . . . Boy, am I getting myself in trouble.”

Despite the gutsy effort, the journal remains heavy with traditional hair-raisers: “Temporality and the Cultural Legitimation of Law,” “Law as Microaggression” and “Lawyers and Legal Consciousness.”

Swaine, however, takes his attempt at devoting an issue to popular culture with traditional Yalie aplomb, and refuses to admit he fell short of his goal. “It’s not something for which we are temperamentally suited,” he said, “and we don’t have the skills necessary to carry off the kind of cultural criticism that this may demand. It was not my ambition to lead a revolution from within. Top-down revolutions are not very successful.”

“Skid Marks: Common Jokes About Lawyers,” the Rafferty book that the Yale Law Journal uses in its July issue, it is a compendium of gags and jokes collected from friends and solicitations from advertisements in two California newspapers. Some examples:

Question: What is the difference between a dead skunk and a dead lawyer in the middle of the road?

Answer: There are skid marks before the skunk.

Q: What do you call 2,000 lawyers chained together at the bottom of the sea?

A: A good beginning.

Q: Why do medical laboratories now use lawyers instead of rats?

A: They breed faster, are less likable and do things that rats won’t do.

Q: What is the difference between a lawyer and a rooster, or a porcupine and two lawyers in a Porsche?

A: (Issues of obscenity prohibit this question from being answered in this space.)