About the Law Review Commons

The Law Review Commons brings together a growing collection of law reviews and legal journals in an easily browsable and searchable format. It contains both current issues and archival content spanning over 100 years.

All Law Review Commons publications are made freely available online through their institutions’ Digital Commons repositories. The Commons includes many of the leading U.S. law reviews—such as the California Law Review and the Duke Law Journal.

Improving the Discoverability of Legal Scholarship

The effort to make all legal scholarship freely and openly accessible has rapidly gained momentum since 2008, when law library directors from 12 top law schools authored the Durham Statement, calling on all law reviews and legal journals to begin publishing in “stable, open, digital formats.” Publishing open access increases the visibility of legal scholarship, makes scholars’ work more discoverable, and may also lead to more citations. A recent analysis found that citation growth rates of open access journals were 3.8 times higher than for comparable non open access journals in 2012.

Include Your Legal Journals in the Law Review Commons

if your law review is interested in publishing open access and being included in the Law Review Commons.

Browse additional open-access legal scholarship from law school repositories in the Digital Commons Network.