The Arkansas Law Review is a legal periodical published quarterly by the students of the School of Law in cooperation with the Arkansas Bar Association. Candidates for the Review are selected from the second- and third-year law classes by the law review editorial board on the basis of scholarship and writing ability.
The Review offers an excellent opportunity to those students with the ability and industry to do legal research and writing of a scholarly and practical nature. All material published in the Arkansas Law Review is edited by a student board of editors and much of it is written by students.
The Arkansas Law Review is sent to each member of the Arkansas Bar Association and to lawyers and law libraries in every state. Review articles and student writings have been relied on by Arkansas courts, courts in other jurisdictions, and legal scholars.
The Arkansas Law Review has gone digital. Check us out at ArkansasLawReview.org.
2009-10 Editor-in-Chief
2009-10 2L Candidates
Eric Scott Bell
Buckley W. Bridges
Nicholas M. Churchill
William F. Clark
Clark A. Donat
Baxter D. Drennon
Ashley L. Driver
Garrett Ham
Holli N. Heiles
Joshua B. Hite
Kristi L. Hunter
Leah M. King
Samantha B. Leflar
Charles Lyford
David S. Mitchell, Jr.
Drew T. Sadler
Noel C. Smith
Toni B. Smith
Michael A. Thompson
Ashley E. Tomlinson
Betsy Turner
Anna C. Webb
Chesley H. Whiteside
Submissions
The Arkansas Law Review invites legal scholars to submit their manuscripts for consideration for publication. In addition to accepting works from scholars across the country, the Arkansas Law Review is also soliciting articles written by Arkansas lawyers, judges, and other legal scholars about topics relevant to Arkansas law. The Arkansas Law Review is published quarterly. We do accept articles for consideration throughout the year; however, manuscripts received between mid-May and mid-August may require an extended review period. Manuscripts may be submitted electronically via e-mail at lawrev@uark.edu. Manuscripts may also be mailed to:
Arkansas Law Review
School of Law
Waterman Hall 107
Fayetteville, AR 72701
Contributors are requested to submit manuscripts in 12 point, double-spaced type. Citations in submissions should adhere to The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (18th ed. 2005). Please use footnotes rather than endnotes. Arkansas cases should be cited to both the Arkansas/Arkansas Appellate Reports (Ark./Ark. App.) and to the Southwestern Reporter (S.W./S.W.2d/S.W.3d). Authors should also provide a resume or paragraph of biographical data. If a submission is received by mail, we regret that those submissions cannot be returned. Ideally, the review process takes three weeks, and authors are notified of decisions by e-mail.
If you have submitted a manuscript for review and would like to request an expedited review, please contact our Managing Editor by e-mail at mailto:lawrev@uark.eduor by phone at 479-575-5610. Generally, we require at least seven (7) business days to complete an expedited review, although some exceptions may be made.
History & Mission
1935, 'A Good Law Review'
Dr. Robert A. Leflar always believed that '[t]he Arkansas bar needed a good law school, and a good law school needs a good law review.' Leflar's interest in the law review was undoubtedly affected by his failure to achieve law review status as a Harvard student. He missed the Harvard Law Review cutoff by one point on a 100-point scale, a fact that has bothered him throughout his life. Efforts to establish a law review began in 1935 when Leflar and Dean Waterman formed a student-faculty committee. Dean Waterman 'urged and really pressed' for the development of a publication of some sort. However, proposals for a law review came to nothing when University President J. C. Futrall wrote the committee that no funds were available for the project.
1940, Arkansas Bar Association
Members of the Arkansas Bar were also interested in the publication of a law review. Following President Futrall's response to the original request for law review money, discussions between the Arkansas Bar Association and the law school began. In 1940, Arkansas Bar Association President Henry Moore, Jr., of Texarkana appointed a special Bar Association Committee on Publication of a Journal, with Leflar as chairman of the committee. Much of the impetus for the establishment of a law review came from those Arkansas lawyers who had attended out-of-state law schools which had already established student-edited law reviews. One of those lawyers was Oscar Fendler of Blytheville, who had attended Harvard Law School and was a member of the Arkansas Bar Association's law review committee. According to Leflar, Fendler 'did much of the work' for the committee. In 1939, Fendler visited with the dean of Harvard Law School and with members of the Harvard Law Review's staff. They encouraged him to suggest a law review ‘which would be helpful to practicing lawyers in Arkansas,‘ though the Harvard staff members did not want to discourage scholarly works.
However, before the Second World War, the Arkansas Bar Association was not able to secure the necessary funds to help publish a law review. A 1941 report to the Bar Association written by Leflar stated:
[T]he [Arkansas Bar] Association at present has no funds with which to finance the publication of a journal. We are strongly of the opinion that it would be unwise to undertake such a publication without the funds actually on hand to finance it. . . . [I]t is the hope of this Committee that the publication of the journal may be kept in mind as being the worthiest and most useful project which could be carried on with . . . increased funds. . . . In conclusion, it is the sense of the Committee that publication of the periodical journal in Arkansas is not far short of being a present possibility and that the project should be pushed as rapidly as is consistent with sound financing.
The committee continued to operate throughout the war years, and John L. Daggett became chairman in 1943. In 1946, Daggett issued a report to the Bar Association in which he called for a 'new committee [to be] appointed . . . to the end that a Journal of widespread interest be published in the name of the Association.'
1947, 'A New Committee'
A new committee was indeed formed in 1947, with William Nash as chairman. This committee immediately began drawing up plans for a new law review. At the 1947 Arkansas Bar Association meeting in Hot Springs, the Bar Association approved the creation of an independent non-profit corporation made up of fifteen directors to manage the law review. The new corporation was called the Arkansas Law Review and Bar Association Journal, Inc. Through the corporation, the law review was to be jointly sponsored by the law school and the Bar Association, with costs divided between those two institutions. The first officers of the new corporation were William Nash, president; Terrell Marshall, vice president; and Ray Trammell, secretary-treasurer.
In fact, the Arkansas Law Review had come into existence before the bar association acted. The first issue--Volume 1, Number 1--was published in January 1947, and the second issue was distributed to Bar Association members shortly before the Bar meeting in Hot Springs in May of that year. These issues were published using money from the law school budget and were edited by law school faculty and students.
Publication of the first two issues of the law review preceded Bar Association approval so the Bar Association would not be called on to buy a 'pig in a poke.' The first editorial board was concerned that most Arkansas lawyers would want to see a copy of the law review before they approved funding for it. Leflar assumed that if the Bar saw the law review and read it, they would not want to give it up. Given the Bar's approval for funding in May 1947, he was apparently correct.
The Next Fifty Years...
There was also an economic benefit for the Arkansas Bar Association in this new arrangement. For over fifty years, the minutes and committee reports of the Bar Association's yearly meetings had been published and distributed as the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Bar Association of Arkansas. By combining the student-edited and -written material from the law school with the proceedings of the Bar Association, the Bar Association saved the cost of printing two publications. Beginning with Volume One, Number Three, the Arkansas Law Review began publishing the Bar Association proceedings as its summer issue. The practice of publishing Bar Association proceedings in the law review continued until 1968, when the law review began publishing only the president's address to the Arkansas Bar Association and the Bar Association itself began publishing reports of its summer meetings and other articles in a separate publication, the Arkansas Lawyer. In 1974, without comment, the Arkansas Law Review quit publishing any portion of the Bar Association meetings within its pages.
In the third issue of the Arkansas Law Review, Leflar wrote, 'The Editor-in-Chief and the Editorial Staff are to be named by the Bar Association corporation which is being established to put out the next publication.' While under the original constitution of the Arkansas Law Review and Bar Association Journal, Inc., the editors could have theoretically been chosen by a board of directors made up of practicing lawyers as well as members of the law school faculty, there is no evidence that anyone outside the law school has ever selected members of the editorial board. While in the past, members of the law review have elected law students from among their own ranks to the editorial board, today, the outgoing editorial board chooses its successors for the next year.
Excerpted from Allen W. Bird II, The History of the Arkansas Law Review, 50 ARK. L. REV. 5 (1997)
Contact Us
Mail:
Arkansas Law Review
University of Arkansas School of Law
Leflar Law Center, Waterman Hall
Fayetteville, Arkansas 72701-1201
Phone:479-575-5610
E-mail:mailto:lawrev@uark.edu
