This month, New York University Law Review launches its 100th volume, just over a century after the first issue debuted in April 1924. A look back at that original number finds topics that remain relevant to the Law School’s mission. One article touts the importance of studying legal history, still a core curricular strength. Another argues for interdisciplinary teaching, well before that term existed for what is now an NYU Law through-line. Perhaps most telling, Paul Kaufman (1924), the first editor-in-chief, invited Bertha Rembaugh (1904) to write an article on “Women in the Law”—even though, in a sign of the times, other writers in the issue refer by default to “men” in the legal profession.
In other ways, the journal has evolved dramatically from its humble beginnings. As of April 2025, HeinOnline ranked the NYU Law Review #12 on the list of most-cited law journals. The masthead of the first issue listed three students; the current masthead lists 141. The journal has published the Madison Lectures delivered at NYU Law by more than a dozen Supreme Court justices, and a Katzmann Lecture by Sonia Sotomayor. Its editors-in-chief—as well as other staffers—have gone on to leadership roles across the legal profession. A prime example is Martin Lipton ’55, the earliest surviving editor-in-chief, who testifies to the importance of his Law Review experience to his life and career trajectory. “I think it had a major impact on me, improved my ability to work with people,” he says. Among those Lipton met on the Law Review were his future co-founding partners of the firm that would define their lives, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. “Everything began with NYU Law,” says Lipton. “Everything was further facilitated and strengthened by serving on the Law Review together.”
Building a Law Review staff is a big endeavor. Typically, roughly 150 to 160 students participate in the writing competition each year, and about 70 are subsequently invited to be staff editors. Ian Leach ’25, the current editor-in-chief, estimates that the journal receives approximately 3,500 submissions annually. The 15 or so members of the articles department undertake a painstaking review process that yields nine selections in each of the two annual submission cycles. It takes an army of editors to make sure the published scholarship is impeccable. Leach describes the Law Review staff’s “very absurd way of reading out loud every word” to ensure any error is caught.
Then there’s the thorough but shorter editorial process for online-only articles. Leach says these pieces are often more practice-oriented or focused on newly decided cases. Recent online contributors have included Nancy Morawetz ’81, co-director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic; Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law; and Melissa Murray, Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law.
Another significant undertaking is the Law Review’s annual symposium, on which the journal typically collaborates with another organization. The theme of this year’s symposium, co-sponsored by the Institute for Policy Integrity, is “Where Does Administrative Law Go from Here?” Other recent symposia have addressed gun rights and regulation (with the Duke Center for Firearms Law), mass incarceration (with the Peter L. Zimroth Center on the Administration of Criminal Law), and data law in a global digital economy (with the Guarini Institute for Global Legal Studies and the Institute for International Law and Justice).
As a preeminent training ground for legal scholars and practitioners, the Law Review has produced many pioneering figures. At a law school that first graduated women in 1892, decades before many of its peers, it’s perhaps not too surprising that the initial issue of the Law Review addressed the subject of women in the legal profession. Rembaugh, the author and a passionate suffragist, would become the first woman to run for a New York City Municipal Court judgeship, losing the election by a mere 500 votes. “Women are already occupying judicial positions,” Rembaugh noted in her article, “probably in fair relation to their representation in the profession…. As far as I know there is no woman general counsel for a railroad or an oil company…. When there is—as there will be—my subject will have completely ceased to exist.”
The following year, Frances Knoche Marlatt (1925)‚ later a member of the New York State Assembly, became the first woman editor-in-chief with the Law Review’s second volume. Cecelia Goetz ’40, LLM ’58, the second woman editor-in-chief, went on to be a prosecutor at Nuremberg and the first woman judge in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of New York. Floria Lasky ’45, editor-in-chief for the July 1945 issue, made her career representing Broadway luminaries such as Jerome Robbins, Tennessee Williams, Burl Ives, Gypsy Rose Lee, and Carson McCullers.
The next woman editor-in-chief did not take the helm until 1973. Linda Donaldson ’74 remembers her election as uncontroversial, while also recalling a general sentiment supporting greater gender parity. She served in the Carter administration at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, then took a tenure-track position at Georgetown University Law Center. Her stint as editor-in-chief opened doors, she says: “At the time, it was still difficult for women to get the kind of legal jobs they wanted.” Since the late 1970s, men and women have served as editors-in-chief in roughly equal measure.
Unsurprisingly, many Law Review editors-in-chief have gone on to teach. Dean Troy McKenzie ’00 notes that the rigorous training in producing legal scholarship can pave the way to a career in academia. (He himself was a 2L staff editor, an executive editor as a 3L, a contributor as a professor, and the journal’s faculty advisor for a decade.) “The thing that law reviews do that is very, very hard to find a substitute for is publishing student work—both encouraging students to try their hand at legal research and writing in an academic style, and also giving students the opportunity to talk to each other, strengthen each other's thinking about a particular subject area, and also to help each other in the process of producing scholarship,” says McKenzie. “That’s what academics do.”
Apart from the numerous editor-in-chief alumni who have taught as adjuncts, more than a dozen have become full-time professors at leading law schools. They include Raymond Lisle ’36, who was dean of Brooklyn Law School; Bernard Schwartz ’44 and Daniel Collins ’54, who each taught at NYU Law for more than four decades; Floyd Feeney ’60, who spent more than half a century at the University of California, Davis School of Law; Nancy Morawetz; and John Goldberg ’91, who has been interim dean at Harvard Law School since March 2024.
Past editors-in-chief also often spend time in government roles. For instance, Richard Skillman ’70 was acting chief counsel of the Internal Revenue Service, and Christopher Meade ’96, now general counsel and chief legal officer of BlackRock, had served previously as general counsel at the US Department of the Treasury. At least five former editors-in-chief have ascended to the bench, including David Furman ’50, who was New Jersey’s attorney general before becoming a New Jersey Superior Court judge, and Abraham Sofaer ’65, who sat on the US District Court for the Southern District of New York before serving as the legal adviser of the US Department of State.
Others have achieved significant successes in the nonprofit and business worlds. Jeremiah Gutman ’49 was a founding member of the New York Civil Liberties Union. Richard Lieb ’53 co-founded Kronish Lieb Weiner & Hellman, which merged with Cooley Godward in 2006. Ann Kappler ’86 is executive vice president, general counsel, and chief compliance offer at Prudential Financial. Many other editors-in-chief have been partners at global law firms.
Fortunately, several have continued to contribute to the Law School’s mission. Herbert Rubin ’42, co-founder of Herzfeld + Rubin, and his wife, Rose Luttan Rubin ’42, endowed the Herbert and Rose Rubin Professorship in International Law, as well as the annual Herbert Rubin and Justice Rose Luttan Rubin International Law Symposium. Murray Bring ’59, retired vice chairman and general counsel of the Altria Group, endowed the Murray and Kathleen Bring Professorship of Law and is an NYU Law Life Trustee. Also on the Law School’s Board of Trustees are Martin Lipton, who chaired NYU’s Board of Trustees as well as the Law School's; Christopher Meade; William J. Williams Jr. ’61, of counsel at Sullivan & Cromwell; and Helam Gebremariam ’10, a partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore.
Over the past century, the focus of the Law Review has often reflected the zeitgeist. In the 1920s and 1930s, it included pieces related to Prohibition, aviation, organized crime, radio broadcasting, and labor relations. Contributors in the 1940s covered topics such as German confiscation of American securities, wartime price controls, and war crimes. In the 1950s, the Law Review illuminated Soviet socialism and school desegregation. The focus in the 1960s included civil disobedience, the patentability of computer programs, civil rights, voting equality, and conscientious objectors. A 1970 article by William Rehnquist, then an assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice, sought to justify President Nixon’s authorization of military actions in eastern Cambodia during the Vietnam War.
In the 1970s, the journal continued to address desegregation while also devoting space to employment discrimination, campaign spending laws, federal drug regulation, marital rape, and abortion. The 1980s saw increased focus on immigration law, labor law, and LGBTQ rights and AIDS, while the 1990s added environmental law, affirmative action, corporate governance, children’s and parental rights, sexual harassment, and online content regulation to the scholarly conversation. The Law Review’s focus on immigration, the environment, and LGBTQ rights persisted into the early 2000s, coupled with new emphasis on counterterrorism, online privacy and speech, voting rights and election law, health care law, class actions, and cybercrime. The regulation of financial institutions, separation of powers, same-sex marriage, and government surveillance have garnered attention in recent years.
Today, Leach says that the Law Review’s leaders “try to prioritize thinking as broadly as we can” about the journal’s scope, noting that he particularly appreciates work from junior faculty and from practitioners who are also scholars. One example he cites is “Living Traditionalism” by Professor Sherif Girgis of Notre Dame Law School, a critical analysis of the Supreme Court’s originalist approach that garnered mention in a 2024 article by New York Times Supreme Court correspondent Adam Liptak.
Topical relevance is key to the journal’s value. In 1975, at a celebratory banquet for the Law Review’s 50th anniversary, Judge James Oakes of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit spoke about the importance of law reviews for judges. “The [law] reviews tell us what the academicians and other bolder judges are thinking…. Law reviews also serve as guides to the future,” said Oakes. “They give us new ideas…. The future editors of the New York University Law Review will have to do what the editors of the past 50 years have done: define the questions, collate sound thinking, use the related sciences, suggest innovative solutions—in short, bring some science into the law.”
Posted April 10, 2025