What’s Important to Write About? A Century of Washington Law Review Topics

Abstract: This Article examines the topics of all lead articles in Washington Law Review during its past ninety-eight years of publication. The analysis illustrates the changing interests of legal academics, student editors, and the working lawyers and judges who have read and used the articles over a century. For its first fifty years, the journal focused on general topics of interest to practitioners, Washington law matters, business and tax law, and government regulation. Other topics, such as legal and judicial system reform, constitutional law, and comparative and international law, were present in modest numbers. In its second half century, Washington Law Review’s content reflected the conscious decision of the University of Washington School of Law’s leadership to make that institution a more national one and the decision of faculty and student editors to turn Washington Law Review into a nationally recognized publication. This yielded a stark reduction in the earlier focus on general law and Washington law articles of interest to legal practitioners. During the past half century, there was a marked increase in lead articles dealing with issues of social justice, the environment, Native American rights, constitutional law, and criminal law. This corresponds to the evolution of the student editors’ concerns as well as the interests of the law school’s legal academics and law professors from around the nation and the world who today publish in Washington Law Review’s pages.