A Quarterly Publication Devoted to Serious and Scholarly Articles Upon Legal Subjects of Peculiar Interest to the Bar of Connecticut

• Publication year: 2021
• Pages: 205

Connecticut Bar Journal Volume 79.

79 CBJ 205. A QUARTERLY PUBLICATION DEVOTED TO SERIOUS AND SCHOLARLY ARTICLES UPON LEGAL SUBJECTS OF PECULIAR INTEREST TO THE BAR OF CONNECTICUT

CONNECTICUT BAR JOURNAL
Vol. 79, No. 4
December 2005

A QUARTERLY PUBLICATION DEVOTED TO SERIOUS AND SCHOLARLY ARTICLES UPON LEGAL SUBJECTS OF PECULIAR INTEREST TO THE BAR OF CONNECTICUT

BY PETER W. SCHROTH*

At its Annual Meeting in April 1926, the Connecticut Bar Association adopted a resolution for the appointment of a committee of five members to establish "a quarterly bulletin or journal of the State Bar Association."1 The committee, chaired by John M. Comley,2 produced the first issue of the Connecticut Bar Journal in January 1927. Many years later, Judge Comley (as he was then) told the story, otherwise apparently unrecorded, of that committee's fundamental decision:

Now that the Journal has taken on such definite and familiar characteristics and has become the traditional symbol of the vigor and vitality of the Association, it is easy to overlook the difficulty of the chief problem of policy which faced that first committee. What kind of publication should it be? There was no local precedent to guide us and little else beyond the borders of the State. As we surveyed the situation we found that many bar associations sponsored publications of one sort or another but, by and large, they were bulletins of a newsy nature devoted to recording the doings of annual meetings and the activities and vital statistics of individual members. After consideration we rejected this idea. We gradually came to the conclusion that our ideal should be a quarterly publication devoted to serious and scholarly articles upon legal subjects of peculiar interest to the Bar of Connecticut. We had no ambition to imitate the great law reviews sponsored by the leading law schools for we could not hope to approach them in either breadth or depth of content or treatment. We did feel that there was a real need for the scholarly discussion of legal subjects which were daily confronting the practicing lawyer in Connecticut.

That was our final decision. It was difficult to make. We were blazing a new path. It is dangerous to rely upon imperfect memory but it is the author's best recollection that there was no similar publication in the United States.3

It is a modest anachronism to refer to Justice Comley as our first Editor-in-Chief and I have committed another in calling him "Justice" or "Judge." When the Bar Journal was founded, he was the Connecticut Supreme Court's Reporter of Judicial Decisions. After practicing law in Stamford for 16 years, he became a Judge of the Superior Court in 1945 and an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court from 1963 to 1965; he died at 79 in 1974. For the first seven volumes of the Bar Journal, there were five members of the Special Committee on Bar Journal,4 and Mr. Comley was listed as the Committee's Chairman. The title "Editor" was not used.

We should ignore that detail, however, and consider function only. On that basis, there have been twenty Editors-in-Chief so far - as set forth in Table 1 - and well over 200 members of the Board of Editors. Last year, I began investigating what had happened to my predecessors, which led me to read at least some of every issue since 1927, and also to speak with a number of interesting people whose memories reach back further than mine. I learned that eleven of the twenty are still alive - namely Elihu H. Berman5 Edward G. Mascolo, Richard W. Tomeo, Peter L. Costas, Emanuel Margolis, Samuel S. Cross, Carolyn P. Gould, Jewel A. Gutman, William T. Barrante, Livia D. Barndollar, James D. Bartolini and I - and was pleased to find that I was already acquainted with nearly all of them. I then proposed this program [for the Annual Meeting in June 2005] and set about inviting all eleven to participate. The topic was to be "anything you like relating to Connecticut law." Some declined, for health or other reasons, but those you see to my left [or whose comments or articles appear in this issue] accepted, bringing us a varied program of scholarly articles and reminiscences. Both categories, I think, are fitting, as we look back on the first 79 years of our "quarterly publication devoted to serious and scholarly...