A founder's retrospective: the Journal at 30 years.

• Author: Abraham, Spencer
• Position: Foreword

As the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy celebrates its 30th anniversary, a brief reflection upon the Journal's history and achievements seems appropriate.

The environment at Harvard and most law schools in the mid-1970s was very different than it is today. Not surprisingly, liberal philosophical viewpoints dominated the HLS community at that time. Unlike today, however, there were virtually no sources of alternative argumentation. Few law professors or students were acknowledged moderates and even fewer would admit to conservative inclinations. Consequently, conservative legal thinkers had virtually no receptive legal periodicals in which to publish. At the time, Harvard offered its students the chance to work on a variety of law journals, each advancing one or another form of liberal legal analysis.

Against this backdrop, a small group of conservative Harvard students began meeting during the 1976-77 academic year to try to address the absence of diversity in the Law School's legal publications. The students were dismayed by the lack of balance in the general legal discussion on campus and frustrated that conservative students seeking to gain legal writing experience could only pursue their interests by helping to edit and publish liberal opinions.

Talk led to action and the group ultimately decided to seek Law School funds to launch a journal aimed at presenting conservative and libertarian views on legal and public policy matters. Predictably, others did not share the organizers' zeal. They were told by then-Dean Albert Sachs that Harvard funds would not be made available for the publication of a law journal that openly advocated a particular philosophical viewpoint.

Asked to explain Harvard's support for the Law School's liberal law reviews, the students were informed that those publications were facially neutral and distinguished by subject matter, not philosophy. The fact that very liberal senior editors--who had long dominated such journals--selected only likeminded younger staffers for leadership positions, and published only ideologically-acceptable articles, was treated as sufficient grounds to separate Harvard from responsibility for the unbroken liberal slant to those periodicals.

In response, a fellow student, Steven Eberhard, and I decided to move ahead without Harvard's financial support and establish an independent publication. By the following school year we had found a benefactor willing to help us publish an initial...