The influence of law reviews, once the pre-eminent venues for legal scholarship, is in sharp decline, according to Adam Liptak, legal correspondent for The New York Times, in his Sidebar column today. Judges don’t cite them nearly as frequently as they once did, preferring instead to use Westlaw or Lexis to dig up their own citations, and some jurists freely admit that they lack the time to keep up with an ever-widening galaxy of law reviews, some of them on quite narrow topics.

Meanwhile, the law-review articles have become less readable and less relevant, as the best legal writers and legal minds have reserved their analyses for blogs or for supporting briefs they file in cases that interest them. Summarizing a recent discussion at Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law about the dwindling influence of legal scholarship on the courts, Mr. Liptak says nearly all the judges in attendance agreed the articles had minimal impact on jurisprudence. And he quotes one judge as saying of his law-review articles, “As far as I can tell, the only person to have read any of them was the person who edited them.”