Northwestern University law review

Northwestern University law review is published by Northwestern University and is in Zone 2 of Sociology in the CAS Journal Ranking (2025 upgraded edition). By OpenAlex counts of its recent articles, its largest topics are Legal Systems and Judicial Processes, Legal and Constitutional Studies and Law, Rights, and Freedoms, together about 48.3% of its articles. Its main subfields are Law. (generated from OpenAlex topic counts and CAS ranking data)

The Northwestern University Law Review is a student-operated journal that publishes six issues of high-quality, general legal scholarship each year. Student editors make the editorial and organizational decisions and select articles submitted by professors, judges, and practitioners, as well as student pieces. First published in 1906, the Law Review has been distinguished by the scholarly qualifications and variety of its participants. Prior Editors-in-Chief include: Justice John Paul Stevens; Roscoe Pound, long-time dean of Harvard Law School; Judge Robert A. Sprecher of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit; Judge Michael Y. Scudder of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit; Dean James A. Rahl; Governor Daniel Walker; Professor Katherine Shaw; and Newton N. Minow, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Other editorial officers have included Justice Arthur Goldberg and Adlai E. Stevenson. The equally distinguished list of contributors to the Law Review includes Dean Leon Green, Sir William Holdsworth, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Albert M. Kales, Nathan William MacChesney, Charles T. McCormick, Sir Frederick Pollock, Dean Roscoe Pound, Dean John Henry Wigmore, Justice Felix Frankfurter, Justice Tom Clark, Justice William O. Douglas, Justice Abe Fortas, Chief Judge Harry T. Edwards, Erwin Griswold, Archibald Cox, Paul Freund, W. Willard Wirtz, Albert Ehrenzweig, H.L.A. Hart, Gerald Gunther, Edward H. Levi, Hubert H. Humphrey, Brunson MacChesney, Nathaniel Nathanson, Dean James A. Rahl, Dean (now professor) David Ruder, Martin Redish, Kenneth Culp Davis, Raoul Berger, Bernard Schwartz, Ian Macneil, John Coffee, Gary Lawson, Mary Becker, Stephen Schulhofer, Nadine Strossen, Judge José A. Cabranes, Judge Richard Posner, Cass Sunstein, and many others. Beyond the Law Review’s traditional legal scholarship, it has published contributions from noted philosopher F.S.C. Northrop, the Right Reverend James A. Pike, Earl Stanley Gardner, and J. Edgar Hoover. In addition to individual contributions, the Law Review has a proud history of special symposium issues on a broad range of important topics. Recent symposium issues have included: The Law-Stem Alliance and Next Generation Innovation (2016); Democratizing Criminal Law (2016); McCleskey v. Kemp (2017); Originalism (2018); and Rethinking Solitary Confinement (2019), the Second Amendment’s Next Chapter (2020); Reimagining Property in the Era of Inequality

From the journal's Aims & Scope

Research area (LetPub): LAW

CAS Journal Ranking

Database indexing

SSCIScopusLetPub

International journal early-warning lists: not listed in any editionLetPub

Editions, and major and minor categories, are shown separately and never merged into one zone; check which edition your institution uses before you submit or report.

Impact

Impact factor

1.69LetPub · 2026-09-13

CiteScore 2026-06

3.1LetPub · 2026-09-13

SJR 2026-06

1.01LetPub · 2026-09-13

SNIP 2026-06

1.62LetPub · 2026-09-13

h-index

21OpenAlex · 2026-10-01

i10-index

41OpenAlex · 2026-10-01

2-year mean citedness

0OpenAlex · 2026-10-01

Self-citation rate

0%LetPub · 2026-09-13

Share of gold OA articles

0%LetPub · 2026-09-13

Volume

Articles per year

35LetPub · 2026-09-13

Sources count differently and were observed at different times, so each source's own value is kept; "publisher" marks figures from the journal's website.

No source has fee information yet; check the journal's website.

The journal's website is authoritative for fees; sources were observed at different times and each keeps its own value, without averaging.

Publisher

Northwestern University

ISSN

0029-3571

Official links

• Journal homepage ↗OpenAlex