Law, Politics, and Debate Merge in HLS Journal

Sitting in Harvard Law School’s Harkness Commons last fall, a group of students decided that the campus lacked a forum for progressive legal thought.

Earlier this month, the students launched the Harvard Law & Policy Review in hopes of promoting discussion among liberal progressives, according to the journal’s editor-in-chief and co-founder, James H. Weingarten.

The publication’s inaugural issue featured an article by Sen. Charles E. Schumer ’71 on congressional power in the 21st century. Schumer, New York’s senior Democratic senator and a Harvard Law graduate, argues that one of the new Democratic majority’s top priorities should be restoring accountability in government.

“The primary mission of the journal is to serve as a home base for progressives to debate,” President and Co-founder Michael A. Negron said yesterday. “It’s a great way to disseminate new ideas.”

The publication asked mainly liberal authors to write for the first issue, and Negron said that the journal’s editors do not plan on making it a top priority in the next few months to reach out to conservative authors.

“We want conservative voices in our pages, but it is not part of our primary mission,” he said.

There are currently about a dozen other student-run publications at the Law School, according to the school’s Web site, but Law & Policy Review’s editors said they believe that their publication will be able to find its own niche with a range of shorter, more accessible articles.

“We are trying to be a little less footnote heavy,” Managing Editor Elizabeth J. Dodson said.

The intended audience is also different from the readership other law journals on campus.

“The Law Review’s audience is professors and legal scholars, almost exclusively,” Weingarten said. “Our focus is to reach our audience of practicing lawyers and policy makers beyond just the legal academy.”

Law School administrators yesterday lauded the Law & Policy Review’s move to bring new ideas to campus.

“There can be no better illustration of our intellectual diversity,” Law School Dean Elena Kagan wrote in an e-mail, noting that another student publication is associated with the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization. The Law & Policy Review, she added, “is clearly going to be a wonderful addition to the best set of student-run journals in the nation.”

The Law & Policy Review will publish twice a year, once in the winter and once in the summer. The summer issue will address the relationship between law and economics.

The journal was launched in partnership with the American Constitution Society, a six-year-old progressive nonprofit educational organization.

—Staff writer Kevin Zhou can be reached at kzhou@fas.harvard.edu.