In 1891, seven students at Yale Law School established the The Yale Law Journal.  At the time, it was only the third student-administered law review in operation, publishing six times a year at an annual subscription price of $2.00.  Today, it is one of the oldest and most widely-cited law reviews in the nation. Since the days of William P. Aiken, Samuel A. York, Jr., Edward G. Buckland, William H. Smith, Robert T. Platt, Francis W. Treadway, and John J. Healey, more than a hundred and twenty Boards of Editors have continued the Journal's original mission of disseminating legal scholarship to the world.

The Journal now resides on the fourth-floor wing of the Sterling Law Building. Although it is guided by a Board of Directors composed of alumni and faculty, all editorial decisions and content are directed by the Editors, who are selected through a competitive admissions process from each class at Yale Law School.

Major Articles 

Fred R. Shapiro's The Most-Cited Articles from The Yale Law Journal (100 Yale L.J. 1449 (1991)), an overview of major articles published by The Yale Law Journal over the years, can be found here.  Over the years, the Journal has published groundbreaking scholarship by both established authors and emerging voices in legal academia and practice.  

The Bluebook 

In 1926, Erwin Griswold, later Dean of Harvard Law School, compiled A Uniform System of Citation. Eighty years and eighteen editions later, it has become known as The Bluebook, the definitive style guide for legal citation in the United States. The Yale Law Journal is one of the four law reviews responsible for the editing and publication of The Bluebook, with assistance from the Law Library of Congress. In 2008, The Bluebook became available in its entirety online at http://www.legalbluebook.com. The Nineteenth Edition was released in the summer of 2010.

The Journal Online 

In 2005, the Journal became the first leading law review to publish an online companion, then titled The Pocket Part.  Intended as a forum for pieces that required faster editing and production schedules than print Articles, The Pocket Part became the preeminent publication for timely, brief, and original legal scholarship. It also published responses to print Journal pieces, recordings and podcasts. The Pocket Part's success began a trend which has seen over a dozen peer journals release their own online companions.

In 2009, The Pocket Part was integrated into The Yale Law Journal Online, a new and expanded online platform intended to further develop scholarship opportunities in the electronic medium. As with The Pocket Part, YLJ Online offers authors the opportunity to publish substantive works which are available in LexisNexis and Westlaw, and are offered on the Journal's website, in PDF form, and as physical reprints.