A faint memory

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Nels Peterson write about Harvard’s newest effort to affect legal debate:  the Harvard Law & Policy Review.  Here’s how they summarize it:

According to the letter, the new journal “will be a forum through which many esteemed legal scholars, advocates and policymakers will rigorously engage and discuss America’s most pressing legal and policy issues.”

The Harvard Law & Policy Review boasts that it will feature “rigorous debate and discussion” and “differing perspectives.” The first issue will include a point-counterpoint between Sen. Chuck Schumer and former federal judge Patricia Wald–a liberal Democratic senator squaring off against a liberal Democratic-appointed judge. If those perspectives don’t differ enough for you, fret not: other contributors listed by the ACS are former Clinton administration official Neil Kinkopf, former Clinton administration official Ron Klain, former Clinton administration official Elaine Kamarck, Harvard law professor (and liberal blogger) Elizabeth Warren, liberal law professor (and blogger) Geoffrey Stone, and liberal political scientist Jacob Hacker. The Harvard Law & Policy Review states, without a hint of irony, that “[t]his breadth of authors reflects our commitment to providing a platform to introduce and discuss new approaches to legal and policy issues.”

The article goes on to point out how closely the name mimics the Federalist Society’s Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, an overtly conservative publication.  It’s an interesting article, and you won’t be wasting your time if you read it.  I mention it here for another reason.

One of the august contributors, Elizabeth Warren, was a professor of mine a long, long time ago at law school.  I haven’t thought about her since graduation because she was a singularly uninspired teacher — boring and confusing.  Then again, since I took her class in my third year, I might just have been tuning her out.  Assuming, though, that my lingering memory of her teaching is correct, I rather wonder how her contributions to the new journal will read.  Of course, the sad thing with law journal articles, as with so much other legal writing (and professional writing generally), is that no one expects these articles to be interesting or enjoyable.