The Art of the Review

What’s a book review for? You might think it’s to supply a summary of the book. Time is short. We’re drowning in stuff to read; it’s hard to keep up even if you dutifully apply the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair and read very fast.

Courts are constantly publishing new opinions. And—even though you’re used to this familiar feature of American law, you should still notice how startling it is—they’re also publishing unpublished opinions, with indefensible rules about whether or how they count as precedents lawyers can cite. Legislatures are publishing floor debates, not to mention committee hearings, and passing new statutes, the latter apparently written by Bulgarian bureaucrats struggling in their fifth semester of English as a second language. Don’t get me started on what the agencies are up to.

(Quick! how many pages were added to the Federal Register while you read this paragraph?) Especially if you fear that some books should have been articles and that most law review articles are too long, you can be forgiven for basking in deep and abiding gratitude to the reviewer who boils things down. If you’re the tiniest bit unscrupulous, you can then pretend to have read the book yourself. You can even cite it, though I hope you have enough of a scholarly conscience left to feel uneasy about that morsel of cheating. (I hope too that “scholarly conscience” is not an oxymoron.) And you can be baffled or annoyed—I am—by the kinds of “reviews” that sometimes appear in, oh, The New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, where the ostensible reviewer can barely be bothered to mention the book she’s allegedly reviewing, but just wants to tell you what she would have said had she written a book on the topic.