PENNumbra

About Us

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About Penn Law Review

Founded in 1852 as the American Law Register, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review is the nation’s oldest law review. For more on the history of the Law Review please read 100 Years and The University of Pennsylvania Law Review: 150 Years of History. In the 2007-2008 academic year, the Law Review will publish its 156th volume.

The Law Review has both a professional and an educational mission. It serves the legal profession, the bench, the bar, and the academy by providing a forum for the publication of original legal research of the highest quality. We accept and scrutinize approximately 2,000 written submissions annually to select approximately twelve articles in each volume. We also ensure uniformity in the citation of authority in legal scholarship and court documents by cooperating with our peer organizations at Columbia, Harvard, and Yale in the maintenance of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation. The Eighteenth Edition of The Bluebook was published on June 1, 2005.

The Law Review also affords Associate Editors two valuable educational experiences. First, we provide training in the performance of all the editorial and administrative tasks associated with the publication of a professional legal journal. Second, we assist each of our members in preparing an original work of scholarship suitable for professional publication. Associate Editors are encouraged to write their student comments on a subject of particular interest to them, and up to twelve comments will be selected for publication.

Each year, the Law Review publishes six issues covering a range of legal topics.

About PENNumbra

The concept of “PENNumbra” was conceived of by two members of our 154th Editorial Board, Jeffrey Nestler and Theodore Weiman, and was developed and launched by the members of our 155th Editorial Board. PENNumbra's name is a play on a famous doctrine of American Constitutional law articulated by Justice William O. Douglas in the landmark United States Supreme Court case of Griswold v. Connecticut. There, in attempting to explain the existence of a constitutional right to privacy, Justice Douglas wrote “that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.” Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 484 (1965). As is well known, the case law that is Griswold's progeny remains the source of ongoing and deep controversy, even as Justice Douglas's own “penumbra” argument has fallen out of favor. Our use of “PENNumbra” should, of course, suggest nothing about our views on Griswold and similar case law. It does, however, suggest something about the value we place in serving as a novel venue in the marketplace of ideas, on the frontier of a refreshing medium that is accessible to legal scholars and to the lay public alike, uniting the Internet and the academy at the nexus of two different spheres: at the PENNumbra.

Citation format for responses to law review articles:
Roderick M. Hills, Jr., Response, Just Following Orders, 156 U. Pa. L. Rev. PENNumbra 165, __ (2007), http://www.pennumbra.com/responses/10-2007/Hills.pdf.

General citation format for debates:
Eric W. Orts & Cary Coglianese, Debate, Collaberative Environmental Law: Pro and Con, 156 U. Pa. L. Rev. PENNumbra 289 (2007), http://pennumbra.com/debates/collabenvlaw.pdf.

Citation format for debates with pincite:
Eric W. Orts & Cary Coglianese, Debate, Collaberative Environmental Law: Pro and Con, 156 U. Pa. L. Rev. PENNumbra 289, 297 (2007), http://pennumbra.com/debates/collabenvlaw.pdf (Coglianese, Rebuttal).