This morning I noticed that the Yale Law Journal is using their Concurring Opinions page to highlight a Jill Pryor note from 1988 addressing the buzzing question of what the Natural Born Citizen clause means. Calvin and I have blogged on previously on this issue, and Calvin highlighted the Pryor note.
I was a regular at Concurring Opinions when we invited journals to join the blog as part of the Law Review Forum Project. We expected the law reviews would highlight new material and generate fresh online dialogue. I don’t think we ever contemplated that they would also use the blog (or the Pocket Part) as a place to feature old but relevant archival material. It strikes me that this is an excellent use of their platform. So much research gets lost over time, under the avalanche of scholarship prepared and published year after year in the law reviews. I think it would be great if law reviews dedicated an editor to similar archival work, resurfacing other pieces relevant to current legal conversations.
Yale's pocket part did that at least once before, when they printed Justice Alito's note:
http://www.thepocketpart.org/2005/09/alito_note.html
I blogged about Alito's note here:
http://www.thefacultylounge.org/2008/02/justice-alitos.html
Law reviews are creating online forums as companions to their regular law review issues. These forums contain very short response pieces, essays, debates, and other works that attempt to bridge the gap between regular legal scholarship and the blogosphere.