The intellectual history of The Shortest Article in Law Review History.

• Author: Jensen, Erik M.

I'm sure you're familiar with The Shortest Article in Law Review History. (1) If perchance you haven't read the piece, take a second and get up to speed. (You can do so right now--no reason to root through musty old issues of the Journal of Legal Education, where Shortest first appeared, (2) or to wait for the abridged version--since "This is it" was, in fact, it. (3)) Shortest has been translated into many languages (4)--not a difficult task, to be sure (5)--and many scholars, obviously taken with the piece, have memorized it. I know I have. I'm ready to declaim Shortest at cocktail parties or while out on the road, on the short circuit.

Many have said that Shortest is the best thing I've ever written (6) (or, if you prefer, not written (7)). It's not the most cited article in law review history, (8) and its influence on the development of legal thought is as yet difficult to measure. (9) By any yardstick, however--whatever ruler of law is used--Shortest gets right to the point, without the intellectual baggage--the many satchel pages--that so many law review articles carry. (10)

In short--sorry!--Shortest makes up for shortness of breadth with depth. One doesn't need to turn up the volume to make a contribution to legal scholarship. And brief though Shortest is, it's chockful of interpretive issues. William Jefferson Clinton taught us about the ambiguities inherent in "is," (11) and "this" and "it" are no easier to unpack. (12)

Shortest attracted much commentary immediately after its publication. The Journal of Legal Education itself printed a couple of responses, demonstrating the interest in the article, (13) and the editors gave me the opportunity to reply to my critics. My Comments in Reply reached a new peak in erudition-by-omission. (14)

Because of Shortest's importance, those interested in the intellectual history of legal thought have every reason to want to know how Shortest came into being and what has followed its ballyhooed publication. (You want to know, don't you?)

This is how it happened. A curmudgeonly colleague was perusing a reprint of one of my earlier articles, (15) a lengthy two-pager, (16) and he exclaimed, "That's it?!" That was an intriguing comment--at least it was the best I could hope for from him--and it got me thinking. (17) I know what a really long article looks like--I've written many myself--but what would the quintessentially short piece look like?

And then the epiphany: That's it!! (18) The quintessentially short article would be Damon Runyon's worst nightmare: a titled page otherwise generally full of "white space." (19) We all know that it's harder to write a good short article than a long one, and drafting Shortest was really, really hard. I started by cutting adverbs and adjectives--normal procedure--but I then moved to nouns, and I scrutinized each pronoun and verb. "This is it" was learning distilled to its essence.

Even then, after the distilling--burp--my work wasn't over. Proofreading is a never-ending task. At one point I was so tired that I dropped the proofs into the dessert. (20)

That's how "This is it" came to be.

Some have questioned my claim that Shortest is the shortest article in law review history. (21) Two scholars went so far as to challenge my priority. For example, Professor Bob Rains...