Welcome to the website for the Columbia Law Review, one of the world's leading publications of legal scholarship. Founded in 1901, the Review is an independent nonprofit corporation that produces a law journal edited and published entirely by students at Columbia Law School. It is one of a handful of student-edited law journals in the nation that publish eight issues a year. The Review is the third most widely distributed and cited law review in the country. It receives about 2,000 submissions per year and selects approximately 20-25 manuscripts for publication annually. In 2007, the Review expanded its audience with the launch of Sidebar, an online supplement to the Review. By bringing together a diverse group of legal scholars, practitioners, community leaders, and judges, Sidebar provides an important, emerging forum for the discussion of pressing legal issues.

Columbia Law Review Writing Competition 2008

The Columbia Law Review’s annual Writing Competition will take place this year from May 16 to May 23, at the close of first-year exams. Everyone interested in joining the Review must participate. Columbia students must register for the Competition on Lawnet in late spring. Details regarding the Competition and the Review will be available at Journal Day, held on April 9.

Transfer students are likewise eligible to apply to the Review through the Writing Competition. Interested transfer applicants must contact Jessie Cheng (jc2867@columbia.edu) to register for and receive information regarding the Competition prior to May 9. Each year the Review invites ten students from the rising Columbia 2L and transfer class to join the Review based on outstanding performance on the Writing Competition alone; transfer students are only considered for these ten slots. While it is the Review’s policy to notify the law school’s admissions office when a transfer applicant is invited to join the Review, this invitation does not guarantee a transfer applicant’s admittance to the law school.

Approximately 40 students from the rising 2L and transfer class will be invited to join the Review this summer.

Announcing the 2008-2010 James Milligan Law Review Fellow

Saira Mohamed is currently a senior advisor to the Special Envoy for Sudan at the U.S. Department of State. She previously was an attorney-advisor for human rights and refugees in the State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser.

Saira received her J.D. from Columbia Law School in 2005. She served as Executive Articles Editor of the Columbia Law Review and is the author of “From Keeping Peace to Building Peace: A Proposal for a Revitalized United Nations Trusteeship Council,” 105 Colum. L. Rev. 809 (2005). While at Columbia, Saira was a James Kent Scholar and a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and was awarded the David Berger Memorial Prize for academic excellence in international law.

Saira also received a Master of International Affairs in 2005 from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. Saira is a graduate of Yale University, where she received a B.A. in History and International Studies, cum laude and with distinction in both majors, in 2000. She was the recipient of Yale’s Andrew D. White prize for the best undergraduate essay in European history in 1998.

Following law school, Saira served as law clerk to Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Saira will begin her tenure as Milligan Fellow in Winter 2008.

Announcing the Launch of Sidebar, An Online Publication of the Columbia Law Review

The Columbia Law Review is pleased to announce the launch of Sidebar, our new online supplement.

The term "sidebar" has different meanings in different contexts. In a courtroom, when attorneys and judges have sidebar conferences, they engage in frank discussion of a live legal issue. When journalists add a sidebar to a story, they provide a deeper insight or a fresh perspective on an issue covered in the accompanying text.

Sidebar, the new online publication of the Columbia Law Review serves both functions. With the new site, the Review joins a growing list of renowned legal publications, practitioners, scholars, bloggers, and others who are engaged in legal discourse online. In addition, the site provides a new take on the issues tackled by scholars in the pages of the Review's print edition, inviting experts in a variety of fields to contribute their own views.

We trust you will enjoy Sidebar as much as you enjoy the Columbia Law Review. If you are interested in contributing to Sidebar or for more information, please do not hesitate to contact the Sidebar Editors at ese@columbialawreview.org.

The Bluebook Goes Online

The Editors of the Columbia Law Review are pleased to announce that an online version of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation was launched on Friday, February 15th. As the standard system of American legal citation, The Bluebook is the best selling law-related book in the world. Now in its eighteenth edition, it was first compiled in 1926 by Erwin Griswold, then an editor of the Harvard Law Review, and later Dean of Harvard Law School. The Bluebook is published by the Columbia Law Review as a wholly student-run joint project of the Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and The Yale Law Journal.

"It has been fantastic to contribute to the development of this new project throughout the past year," says outgoing Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Law Review, Karin Portlock. "In particular, we hope that the new online version of The Bluebook becomes a widely used resource for the legal community."

The new online format responds to longstanding requests for a fully-featured electronic edition of The Bluebook that is easier to search, use, and teach. It allows practitioners and students with jurisdiction-specific or publication-specific citation rules to integrate these into their group, and makes an essential tool of legal writing fully accessible to the visually impaired. In addition, the online version is designed to respond to the developing needs of the legal community by addressing a wide array of evolving foreign, international, administrative, and electronic materials much more fully than is possible in the print version.