SOME PEOPLE WHO HAVEN’T READ A LOT OF LAW REVIEW ARTICLES — and some others who have — were suprised at how short my Cheney piece was. It was shorter than a lot of law review articles, including a lot of mine, but not as short as all that. Shorter pieces are in now, with law reviews like Northwestern’s, or Yale’s, having special sections. But I was writing short articles long before that: My Chaos and the Court, applying chaos theory to the Supreme Court in the Columbia Law Review, was equally short; likewise Penumbral Reasoning on the Right, in Penn’s law review, or the piece on judicial confirmation from the Southern California Law Review that I linked a bit ago. And I was hardly a pioneer — my heroes Charles Black and Arthur Allen Leff were known for their interesting short pieces, but the world of law-review writing moved away to massive tomes for a while. I think it’s shifting back, and I think that’s a good thing. Short pieces aren’t inherently superior to long ones — and I’ve written plenty of long ones myself — but a piece should be as long as it needs to be, and no longer. For a while, we lost sight of that.