 Hi, this is Mary Wisner from the Gallagher Law Library. This lesson is about law review articles. First, what are law reviews or law journals? They are scholarly legal periodicals. Periodicals means that they're published on a schedule, for instance monthly, annually, or four times a year. Scholarly means they're academic, backed up with citations. Law reviews are usually published by law schools and edited by law students. In this way, law reviews are different from journals in most other fields. Law journals are sometimes published by professional organizations or commercial publishers and edited by professors or other professionals. The articles in law reviews tend to be 20 to 80 pages long. They generally start off with an overview of the problem, give some background, critique and analyze the issues, and often end with proposals. They are packed with footnotes, and these footnotes are carefully checked during the editing process to make sure that every citation, every page reference, every quotation is accurate. That makes them great leads for further research. The articles are written by law professors, lawyers, judges and others, and these articles are usually called articles. There are also articles that are written by law students, but most journals set these apart and call them notes or comments so that readers can easily tell that they're written by students rather than professionals. Law schools often publish several journals. It's common to have one that's the flagship law review that publishes articles on many topics, whether it's international law or estate planning, criminal procedure or copyright law, and then specialty journals that focus on specialized areas of law. For example, here at the University of Washington School of Law, we have the Washington Law Review, which has been in publication since the 1920s, and we have three journals on specialized topics. The Washington International Law Journal, the Washington Journal of Environmental Law and Policy, and the Washington Journal of Law, Technology and Arts. Some people wonder about when to say law review and when to say law journal. At many schools, like UW Law, the general publication is called a law review, and the others have journal in their title. But there are exceptions to this. For instance, at Yale, the general review is called the Yale Law Journal, and they have at least one specialty journal that has the word review in the title. You'll also run into things like this. The University of Indiana has two law schools, one in Bloomington and one in Indianapolis. Each has a general interest journal, but the names are different. The Indiana Law Journal from Bloomington and the Indiana Law Review from Indianapolis. It's okay to use the terms interchangeably when you're talking about articles generally. I'm looking for some law review articles about housing segregation, or my professor recommended a law journal article about bargaining power in contracts. When you're citing an article or looking up an article someone else cited, pay attention to the name, because that's how you'll look it up. To recap, law reviews or law journals are scholarly periodicals about the law. In part two, we'll talk about where you can look up journal articles. And then in part three, we'll show you how to search for journal articles on subjects you're interested in. This is Mary Wissner from the Gallagher Law Library. Visit our website for library services, research guides, and more, lib.law.uw.edu.