THE YALE LAW JOURNAL (well, actually its Managing Editor) emailed to say that they’re going to start putting articles on the web because of the tremendous response to James Lindgren’s article on Michael Bellesiles’ Arming America. I think that’s great.

I’m sure that most law review articles won’t get nearly so much attention — Lindgren’s piece has been downloaded almost 91,000 times off this server, and I’m sure it’s gotten a lot of downloads elsewhere now that it’s up on several other sites. Lindgren had a timely and thorough analysis on a very controversial subject. But I do think that there’s a lot more interest by laypeople in legal scholarship generally than most of us in the academy realize. My review of Clay Conrad’s book on jury nullification, for example, has only been downloaded 3211 times. But that’s still about the same as the Yale Law Journal’s dead-tree circulation.

I hope that other schools and journals will follow Yale’s lead. Law Reviews are supposed to be, in part, a public service and the Web allows them to reach far more people than previously, and at very little cost.