Ninety Years of the Iowa Law Review: The Personalities, Policies, and Events that Shaped an Enduring Tradition in Iowa Legal Education

• Author: Willard L. Boyd; Randall P. Bezanson
• Position: Rawlings-Miller Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Iowa College of Law; David H. Vernon Professor of Law, Uni
• Pages: 01

Willard L. Boyd; Randall P. Bezanson: Rawlings-Miller Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Iowa College of Law, and President Emeritus, University of Iowa and The Field Museum (Chicago, Il).

David H. Vernon Professor of Law, University of Iowa College of Law.

With the research assistance of Gregory T. Densen.

Page 2

I The Iowa Law Review: Origins And Models

At the beginning of the twentieth century, legal education, like all forms of professional education, was the subject of great and active debate. Legal education was only beginning to find a home in universities; much legal training continued to occur at the knee of a judge or in the office of a local lawyer. The educational program offered by universities, too, was out of step with the then-current progressive thinking, for it remained steeped in the classical tradition of treatise and lecture, abstracted from the law's application to real social and economic problems and not connected with the practical thinking skills demanded of a lawyer in America's twentieth century economic, social, and legal system.

Clearly, professional education had to be improved, and bringing legal education into universities was seen as a major means of doing so. The exact form the educational program should take, however, was a matter of considerable dispute. A report advocating diversity in educational approaches and types of law schools, with some retaining the classical approach and others more clinical and case-based approaches, failed to gain credibility.¹ A new approach had been developed at Harvard, however-the case method. Without any national consensus among educators about the form that university-based legal education should take, a model for sound legal education was unofficially adopted. Follow Harvard!

The Iowa Law School bore the imprint of Harvard almost from its beginning. When Eugene Wambaugh came to the Iowa faculty from Harvard in 1889, Iowa became one of the early schools to adopt the case method of teaching pioneered by Chrisopher Columbus Langdell at Harvard. And when Herbert Goodrich came to Iowa from Harvard twenty- five years later in 1914, he responded readily to Professor Percy Bordwell's proposal to reestablish the Iowa Law Bulletin and serve as its Editor-in- Charge.

The time was ripe for a new journal. Emlin McClain had just returned from the Supreme Court of Iowa to serve as the Law School's Dean. From 1891 to 1900, during Judge McClain's prior tenure as a faculty member, the Law School had published a Bulletin. According to Dean Ladd, the original Bulletin had been

widely recognized in its day and represented an early urge on the part of the Iowa Law School to contribute to the literature of the law. This early publication was quite different from law reviews of today. It contained listings of leading cases classified under the different phases of a subject, and much of the writing consisted of hypothetical cases and analytical studies in the various subjects of Page 3 the law. The Bulletin reflected a period of transition in legal education from a reliance upon treatises and textbooks to an emphasis upon situational studies and cases.²

The new Bulletin was inaugurated in January of 1915. In the introduction to its first issue, the new Bulletin acknowledged its predecessor:

While the old series of the Bulletin was published by the faculty of the College of Law, the new series is edited by the faculty and students. The student board is made up of men of high rank chosen from the Juniors and Seniors of the Law College. The Notes and Recent Cases which appear in this number are due to their efforts. Members of the faculty assist with criticisms and suggestions, but the work is that of the student board.

The Bulletin does not purport to be a review of current decisions throughout the common law world, nor even of the important cases decided in the United States. This field it believes to be carefully and adequately covered by older publications. Its efforts are to be directed to a narrower field of law, that of this state. . . .

Without in the least suggesting that its statement will be the last word on any legal subject, the Bulletin hopes that it may be of service not only to the students of this College of Law, but to the bar of the state as well.³

Explicit directions were given to the members of the student editorial board. Everyone was assigned to read select cases from the Northwestern Reporter, the Supreme Court Reporter, and the Federal Reporter.⁴ The instructions stressed Iowa cases. At a mandatory group meeting, members reported on cases and were assigned important ones for a preliminary written report. If a topic was deemed promising, the student was expected to develop a first draft of a case or note. The draft would be reviewed by a faculty member in whose area the subject fell, and thereafter the student would do further work as suggested by the faculty member.

"Always look for Iowa cases" was the Bulletin's guiding premise. It was a goal honored even then, and surely since, as much in the breach as in the promise. Iowa developments were not ignored, but the reporting horizon has always been broader. Page 4

II The Iowa Law Or More

In 1925, the Bulletin became the Iowa Law Review. In announcing the change, it was stressed that the purpose of the periodical would remain "'to present scientifically the law of Iowa.'"⁵ Faith in the application of knowledge to practical problems thus continued, as did the focus on Iowa. While "occasionally an article of general scope will appear," the Law Review announced, in the main "the Review will direct its efforts to a narrow field of law, that is, the law of the state."⁶

According to Dean Ladd, the Iowa limitation was immediately disregarded, as it had been from the very beginning of the new Bulletin- and as it would be thereafter and to the present.⁷ Throughout its history, the Iowa Law Review has paid attention to Iowa cases and to topics growing out of Iowa law. However, the near-exclusive focus on Iowa law promised by the newly named Iowa Law Review would never be realized-a fact that caused frustration for and criticism from many generations of Iowa lawyers, but that also contributed to the ever-increasing national presence and reputation of the Iowa College of Law.

In 1933, the Law Review set a national precedent. Dean Hines would later observe, with understandable pride, that the legal symposium was introduced to legal scholarship through the fertile imagination of then faculty advisor, Professor Paul Sayre. Sayre's brilliant idea of combining the talents of a number of outstanding legal scholars to write about different aspects of a common theme was immediately successful, and was emulated by . . . other legal periodical[s].⁸

The first symposium focused on administrative law and included contributions from Felix Frankfurter and John Henry Wigmore.⁹ A symposium on an issue of national importance marked most subsequent volumes until the late 1960s.

The continuing vitality of the Law Review manifested thirty-five years later in 1968 with the inauguration of the "Contemporary Studies Project."¹⁰Unlike the symposia, the Contemporary Studies Projects were large-scale, often interdisciplinary research projects undertaken by the Law Review Page 5 editors and staff. They typically involved an empirical investigation of the operation of an institution or legal process, conducted by a team of Law Review student writers and supervised by a student editor. The projects were major efforts that often spanned more than a single year, so they were not published on a regular schedule.

Like the symposia first developed by the Iowa Law Review, the Contemporary Studies Projects became the stimulus for interdisciplinary projects of similar character at other law reviews throughout the country. Many of the Iowa Law Review's projects received national attention and significantly affected legislative, executive, and judicial reforms in Iowa and elsewhere.¹¹

III Faculty Advisors And Student Editorial Responsibility

Professor Goodrich was always the Bulletin's advocate. He took great pride in the students' work and went to some lengths to bring the Bulletin to the attention of a wider audience. He once wrote, for example, to an Arkansas Supreme Court Justice recommending for consideration the treatment of a case report involving "the liability of the seller of food."¹² He also replied to critical comments on student work published in the Bulletin. In one such reply to Judge Scott Mason Ladd of the Iowa Supreme Court, Professor Goodrich thanked the judge for his "discriminating estimate of our Law Bulletin work."¹³ He then spoke of the challenge of developing writers only to have them graduate when they are doing good work. He admitted that the Bulletin was not always right, but gently and wisely concluded, "After all, the most valuable part of such a comment is to stimulate thought and if the view taken is well worked out the effort seems worth the doing."¹⁴

The masthead of Volume 21, published after the Bulletin had become the Iowa Law Review, carries the following note:

Entering its twenty-first year of publication, the Iowa Law Review takes a place among those law reviews of the country which follow the Harvard system of complete student editorial responsibility. Page 6 Election to the Review comes as an honor bestowed for demonstrated legal scholarship and affords unsurpassed opportunity for intensive training in original legal research and thought. The adoption in its entirety of the policy of student editing makes available this opportunity in fullest measure, while by the same token insuring the publication of a Review of maximum service...