Reading Law Review pieces, other suggestions Forum

[patfeeney]

There's probably some thread on here somewhere about this topic, but I can't seem to find one.

Basically, I was wondering if anyone had particular strategies for reading longer law review articles effectively/efficiently - or if you know of any good resources for this kind of thing.

I'm not looking for advice to read a twenty or thirty-page piece. I mean hardcore, 100+ page, super-dense pieces of scholarship. For example, right now I'm trying to get through "Property, Utility, and Fairness" by Michelman, and I just can't wrap my head around any of it because it's a dense theoretical argument spread out over some 95 pages of dense type. I don't even know how to begin with it... do I skim, then read? Do I write an outline as I go along? Do I start with questions to get out of it? (it's an assigned reading for a property course).

But yeah, any suggestions are cool.

[Avian]

I would just read it and take notes on major arguments as you go. If a piece is particularly long, you may find that you forget the precise details of each argument by the time you get to the end, so best to make note them as you read.

[Br3v]

There's probably some thread on here somewhere about this topic, but I can't seem to find one.

Basically, I was wondering if anyone had particular strategies for reading longer law review articles effectively/efficiently - or if you know of any good resources for this kind of thing.

I'm not looking for advice to read a twenty or thirty-page piece. I mean hardcore, 100+ page, super-dense pieces of scholarship. For example, right now I'm trying to get through "Property, Utility, and Fairness" by Michelman, and I just can't wrap my head around any of it because it's a dense theoretical argument spread out over some 95 pages of dense type. I don't even know how to begin with it... do I skim, then read? Do I write an outline as I go along? Do I start with questions to get out of it? (it's an assigned reading for a property course).

But yeah, any suggestions are cool.

100+ pages is more often than not a sign of poor writing rather than dense "scholarship." LR pieces used to be longer back in the day, but still.

Skim it, using the headings as your guide as to what is going on.

[Jchance]

Most LR article follows this format:
1. Intro with Roadmap paragraph at the end
2. Background section(s)
3. Arguments section(s)
4. Conclusion

To fully get the gist of the article, you can just read the intro and conclusion. The paragraph before the roadmap paragraph normally is the thesis of the paper. To get a more detailed understanding of the article, read the argument section(s) (which should be more than half of the article itself). Once you have a full understanding of the intro+conclusion, you can skim-read the argument section(s). The background section(s) is written for people not familiar with the topics, so you can skip that section if you have the knowledge.

P.S. No one reads the footnotes, a 100-page LR article is more like 30 full-text pages if the author did it right.

[BVest]

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