From Legal Curiosity to Scholarly Exploration
How to Outline a Law Review Article (Part 1 of 6)
In 1982, a young law professor named Kimberlé Crenshaw began exploring an observation rooted in her civil rights litigation experience: courts treated race and gender discrimination as entirely separate issues.
This curiosity eventually led to her groundbreaking 1989 article, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-Discrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics, which introduced intersectionality, a concept that fundamentally transformed legal analysis across multiple fields.
What began as a simple question—why can’t Black women claim discrimination based on their combined identity?—evolved into a scholarly contribution that reshaped legal thought and practice.
As Crenshaw’s example reveals, writing a law review article is more than an academic exercise. It’s an intellectual journey that begins with curiosity and, with proper development, can reshape entire fields of law. Yet for many scholars, particularly those early in their academic careers, the path from initial idea to publishable article remains mysterious and daunting.
For starters, the process of writing a law review article can take several months to complete—and in some cases, more than a year—often involving multiple rounds of revision based on critical feedback during scholarly presentations. Personally, I have worked on some projects for years, continuously tweaking, revising, and rewriting along the way.
Second, success depends not only on legal insight but also on cultivating a sustainable scholarly practice of continuous research and writing—one that nurtures intellectual growth and resilience amidst an ever-evolving legal and political landscape that can quickly become demoralizing or challenge your thesis midway through a project.
My goal with this installment of The Tenure Track is to help demystify the process of legal scholarship by sharing some of my own insights on outlining law review articles. While some scholars like to shoot from the hip, I firmly believe that a strong outline can both accelerate the writing process and sharpen the clarity and impact of your legal analysis.
Before we begin, I want to acknowledge that writing a law review article can be mentally and even emotionally draining. Therefore, it is crucial to integrate well-being strategies along the way. While I will not delve into these important topics in this series, practices like mindfulness, exercise, and good nutrition are essential support systems for your scholarly journey.
Additionally, a safe and supportive learning environment—one built on respect, open dialogue, and constructive feedback—can help cultivate your best scholarly work. Diverse perspectives are an asset to the academic experience, and embracing vulnerability in your writing by sharing your ideas with a wide range of thinkers can deepen your engagement with the material. This is one reason why law teaching fellowships and visiting assistant professorships (VAPs) serve as excellent entry points into the academy for many working professionals.
Assuming you have a plan to address these concerns, let’s move on to the nuts and bolts of the law review article. Over six installments, I’ll break down the process that I personally use to begin outlining my law review articles, complete with examples from a project I am currently outlining and homework assignments for you to follow along too.
We will discuss:
Topic Ideation and Research
Developing a Compelling Thesis
Framing the Problem
Building Robust Arguments
Crafting Practical Solutions
Maintaining Writing Momentum
Each stage will build upon the last, guiding you from an initial spark of curiosity—an idea—to a fully realized, impactful piece of legal scholarship that you can confidently workshop with your peers.
To be sure, this process is only designed to help you get started (and this is my personal process, which I often tweak depending on the project). There are many ways to structure a law review article and produce a first draft, depending on your topic, your goals, your discipline, your methodology, and even your theories about the law itself and its relationship to society. Here, we will focus on the fundamentals.
Let’s get started with identifying your topic!
A. From Idea to Topic: Unleashing Your Research Potential
Legal research begins with curiosity—that moment when an observation, a news story, or a personal experience sparks a deeper question about the nature of law, politics, or society. Your challenge as a legal scholar lies in transforming that initial spark into a scholarly investigation that broadens legal understanding.
The most compelling research emerges from unexpected intersections of disparate topics, innovative perspectives on conventional modes of thinking, or underexplored problems that have meaningful implications for modern society.
As you explore ideas, consider questions such as:
How are social, political, and economic transformations creating novel legal problems that have no clear answers?
In what ways are technological innovations disrupting existing legal frameworks or challenging conventional modes of legal thought and practice?
Which critical perspectives on law and society remain underrepresented in current scholarship, such as alternative views of the economy, the workplace, the household, governance, national security, immigration, etc.?
Exploring legal research databases like HeinOnline, Google Scholar, and SSRN can help you begin to identify emerging debates and unresolved questions. Look for articles that discuss topics of interest and try to get a sense of the larger questions being asked.
Pro Tip: Imagine scholarship as a conversation taking place at a dinner table.
Your role as a newcomer at the table is to identify what topics scholars have already been discussing (by reading their articles), discover what has not yet been said about those topics (by searching for missing links and hidden insights), and determine how you can contribute to the conversation in a unique and meaningful way.
As you scan abstracts and articles, look for:
Gaps in current scholarship
Emerging legal frontiers
Potential areas for innovative research
Great legal research often involves identifying unresolved tensions in the law. Consider examining recent court decisions where judges express dissenting opinions or uncertainty in their conclusions; pending legislation that spark intense debate; or policy shifts that create ambiguities in legal interpretation.
This type of research can be conducted at the local, state, federal, or even international level, using a comparative approach to identify trends and uncover hidden insights. By grounding your topic in pressing legal questions and searching for tension in the dialogue, you ensure your research remains relevant and impactful.
A Strategic Approach to Preliminary Research
When beginning your research journey, employ these specific strategies to maximize efficiency:
Database Deep Dive: In HeinOnline, use the “Law Journal Library” and filter by “Most Cited” to identify seminal works in your area. In SSRN, examine download counts and citations to gauge impact. On Google Scholar, use the “Cited by” feature to follow citation chains forward in time.
Conference Tracking: Follow proceedings from the past 2-3 years of conferences like the AALS Annual Meeting, the Law and Society Association, or specialized conferences in your field to identify emerging trends before they appear in published articles.
Faculty Workshop Papers: Request access to works-in-progress (WIPs) presented at faculty workshops, which often reveal cutting-edge research directions 6-12 months before publication.
Judicial Opinions Analysis: Create a spreadsheet tracking recent decisions in your area, noting instances where judges explicitly identify unresolved questions or call for scholarly attention.
Interdisciplinary Database Exploration: Venture beyond legal databases to search in the humanities (JSTOR), economics (NBER), or history (Law and History Review) to identify perspectives not yet integrated into traditional legal scholarship.
Before we go further, a quick reality check:
If you’ve ever felt like your career is being weighed down by setbacks or failures, you’re not alone. But the failures we face—rejected publications, tough evaluations, or unfulfilled expectations—are not the end of the road. They are opportunities to find deeper purpose and resilience in our work.
At The Tenure Track, we help you transform these challenges into opportunities. We focus on more than just research and writing. We help you build a foundation that ensures your scholarship is meaningful, impactful, and engaged with.
Ready to turn struggle into purpose? Subscribe to The Tenure Track for strategies to grow your scholarship, expand your network, and make a lasting impact.
B. Visualizing Connections in Legal Research
Concept mapping is a powerful yet often underutilized tool that reveals patterns and relationships between ideas that might not be immediately obvious. By visually organizing key legal concepts, emerging trends, and interdisciplinary insights, you can create a clearer roadmap for your research and begin to map how your law review article connects to a larger research agenda.
How to Build a Concept Map:
Start with your central research idea at the core.
Extend outward by linking related legal issues, historical precedents, and policy implications.
Identify existing scholarship that engages with each of the nodes you create in your map.
Spot unexpected intersections—how different areas of law influence one another, or how distinct pieces of scholarship might speak to one another.
For example, imagine a concept map with environmental justice at the center. Consider these thought-provoking connections:
How does an environmental regulation debate connect to a corporate governance debate?
What legal questions arise from the increasing reliance on artificial intelligence in judicial decision-making?
How do historical frameworks of justice shape contemporary legal arguments?
The goal of this visualization exercise is to push beyond conventional legal analysis and uncover fresh perspectives. By mapping these connections, you gain a deeper understanding of how different legal doctrines interact, allowing you to frame your research within a broader, more compelling scholarly context.
You will also identify multiple pathways for analysis, which can lead to several research avenues within a robust and interconnected research agenda.
Additionally, visualization aids in refining your argument structure. It enables you to see where additional research is needed, which areas of law intersect in meaningful ways, and how your ideas can be strengthened. This iterative process will help refine your research focus and provide a solid foundation for your article.
C. Topic Refinement: Crafting a Compelling Research Focus
Selecting a research topic is more than simply choosing an area of interest. It requires a deliberate and strategic evaluation of the various ways one can explore an issue area. A strong topic must transcend surface-level intrigue to engage with legal scholarship in a way that is both timely and transformative.
It is not enough to simply select a broad topic like “affordable housing” for your scholarship. To refine your topic, ask yourself key questions that focus your inquiry:
Does this research challenge existing legal frameworks?
Does it contribute meaningfully to ongoing scholarly debates?
Does it introduce novel insights into legal practice or theory?
Does it address a meaningful gap in legal understanding?
Refining your topic involves deciding what questions you want to ask about it that have either not been asked yet or need to be explored further. Groundbreaking scholarship often emerges when these questions push the boundaries of current knowledge and bring something new to the conversation.
Great questions—and consequently, great legal scholarship—often emerge at the intersections of disciplines. For example, consider how emerging technologies are reshaping privacy rights in public housing, or how environmental policy intersects with racial justice in local governance, or how international law adapts to human rights crises in capitalist economies. These questions open up opportunities for fresh perspectives and interdisciplinary exploration.
Once you identify a potential research topic, the next step is to test its viability. Here’s how to assess your topic’s potential:
Examine Existing Scholarship: Review the current body of literature to determine whether your topic is original. Consider how your research could contribute to ongoing scholarly dialogues. This step helps ensure that you are adding value to existing conversations rather than duplicating them.
Assess Interdisciplinary Impact: Explore what scholars in related fields are saying about the topic. Interdisciplinary engagement not only broadens your perspective but also enhances the relevance of your work. Consider how perspectives from sociology, economics, or political science, for example, might enrich your analysis.
Ensure Depth and Feasibility: Your topic should have enough depth to sustain a full-length article. Study how other scholars have addressed similar topics to gauge whether there’s sufficient material to develop a robust argument. Avoid topics that are too narrow or too broad, as these can limit your ability to conduct thorough research or develop a comprehensive analysis.
Strong research topics are historically and socially relevant but also possess the flexibility to evolve as new perspectives emerge during the research process. As you explore your topic, you may uncover unexpected connections or insights that shift the direction of your work. This evolution is a natural part of scholarly inquiry and contributes to the originality of your article.
Keep in mind that the most compelling legal scholarship does not merely summarize existing law; it critically engages with it. Great research offers fresh insights and practical applications, often by integrating new information and unconventional perspectives. It also challenges readers to think differently about legal issues and contributes to the ongoing transformation of legal theory and practice.
D. Case Study: Finding Inspiration at Unexpected Intersections
To illustrate how these principles work in practice, let me share the early stages of a law review article I’m currently developing, tentatively titled “Breaking the Machine: Toward Non-Reformist Corporate Governance Reform.”
My research journey began with a seemingly simple question: Does Delaware’s Senate Bill 21, which modified corporate governance rules, represent meaningful reform, or does it merely reinforce existing power structures?
At first, this curiosity might have led to a conventional analysis of corporate law amendments. However, by seeking unexpected intersections, my research took a more innovative turn.
While researching corporate governance history, I stumbled upon accounts of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, when workers seized rail yards and destroyed company property after railroad companies slashed wages during an economic depression. This historical episode is not typically discussed in corporate governance literature, yet it illuminated how workers directly confronted a corporate governance system that prioritized shareholder profits over worker livelihoods.
This connection between historical labor resistance and modern corporate governance reform might be clarified by a modern analytical framework used by critical legal theorists: the distinction between “reformist” versus “non-reformist” reforms. Rather than accepting the conventional parameters of corporate governance discourse, this approach might allow me to question the fundamental assumptions underlying corporate power structures.
My concept map began with SB 21 at the center, but it quickly expanded to include:
Historical examples of worker resistance to corporate power
Theories of racial capitalism and its perpetuation through corporate law
Critiques of shareholder primacy from labor and community perspectives
The metaphor of corporate governance as an “engine” with distinct operational stages (this builds upon a current WIP where I introduce this conceptual framework to define racial capitalism through the lens of corporate law)
This intersectional approach transformed what might have been a narrow, technical analysis into a richer scholarly contribution that connects corporate law to broader questions about economic democracy, labor movements, and power.
Next, I refined my broad interest in corporate governance reform by focusing specifically on the distinction between reforms that adjust existing power structures and those that fundamentally restructure them. Rather than merely analyzing SB 21’s provisions, I developed research questions that examined how the law perpetuates or challenges existing power dynamics at each stage of corporate operation—from who enters leadership positions (the “intake” stage) to who bears the costs of corporate activities (the “exhaust” phase).
This approach will enable me to contribute to scholarly conversations about both corporate law doctrine and its broader sociopolitical implications.
E. Common Pitfalls in Topic Selection
While I hope my exploration of corporate governance reform will lead to a meaningful scholarly contribution, the journey will inevitably involve challenges—challenges that reflect the common pitfalls many scholars face during the topic selection process.
Being aware of these common pitfalls can help you navigate around them and refine your scholarly focus.
The “Already Written” Trap
Warning Signs: You discover multiple recent articles addressing your exact question.
Solution: Rather than abandoning the topic, identify a distinctive angle or methodology that previous scholarship has overlooked. Look for ways to push the conversation forward by offering fresh perspectives or applying existing ideas to new contexts. This could involve integrating interdisciplinary approaches, introducing novel data, or testing existing theories in different jurisdictions or time periods.
The “Too Broad” Problem
Warning Signs: You struggle to explain your topic in a single paragraph, or your research spans multiple unrelated legal doctrines.
Solution: Begin with a narrow aspect of your broader interest and focus on a specific issue or case. Once you’ve fully explored this narrower topic, you can then expand it into a larger research question or agenda over time. It’s important to first develop a solid foundation and then scale up gradually.
Example: In my “Breaking the Machine” project, I initially tried to tackle all aspects of corporate governance reform, which was far too broad. I later narrowed my focus specifically to the reformist versus non-reformist distinction, using Delaware’s Senate Bill 21 as a case study. This allowed for deeper analysis and a clearer scholarly contribution.
The “No Dialogue” Dilemma
Warning Signs: You find little existing scholarship to engage with, or you struggle to identify scholars working in related areas.
Solution: Consider whether the topic genuinely fills a gap in the literature or if it simply lacks scholarly interest. If the latter is the case, think about how to reframe your topic to connect with ongoing conversations in the field. This may involve identifying and addressing foundational debates or aligning your research with broader issues that scholars are already exploring. A well-positioned topic should engage with existing academic dialogue, even if it challenges prevailing assumptions.
The “Data Desert” Challenge
Warning Signs: Your research requires empirical evidence that doesn’t exist or is inaccessible.
Solution: Modify your approach to work within the available data constraints, or consider whether you can generate original empirical research. If your topic requires data you can’t access, explore alternative ways to test your hypothesis—such as qualitative methods, case studies, or theoretical frameworks. In some cases, collaborating with scholars in fields like economics, sociology, or political science may provide avenues for acquiring the necessary data.
The “So What?” Syndrome
Warning Signs: Colleagues respond to your topic with polite nods rather than engaged questions.
Solution: Explicitly articulate the real-world implications of your research. Be clear about the legal problems your scholarship seeks to address, and how it will make a tangible impact. A strong research topic should not only advance legal theory but also have practical applications or inform policy debates. If others don’t see the value of your work, it may signal that you haven’t yet fully developed the “so what” of your argument—why it matters in the broader legal, political, or social context.
Example: For “Breaking the Machine,” I plan to emphasize how rethinking corporate governance through a labor history lens might inform current debates about worker representation on corporate boards, making it relevant to ongoing conversations about economic justice and democratic participation in the workplace.
Remember, encountering these pitfalls does not mean your topic is a failure. In fact, they often present opportunities to refine your focus, clarify your research questions, and strengthen your overall contribution. These challenges are part of the scholarly process and can ultimately lead to more focused, original, and impactful legal research.
F. Homework: Your Scholarly Exploration Begins Now
As we embark on this journey, your homework is to begin exploring your intellectual passions and scholarly potential.
Topic Ranking Exercise:
Identify 2-3 potential research topics using the guidelines discussed above
Create an evaluation matrix to assess them against their: (1) legal significance, (2) interdisciplinary potential, (3) policy impact, (4) research feasibility, and (5) publication potential
Reflective Journaling:
Document the origins of your research ideas
Explore challenges encountered in topic selection
Capture insights gained through initial research
Reflect on your emotional and intellectual journey
A law review topic is more than just a research assignment. It is an opportunity to challenge established paradigms, expand legal understanding, and potentially influence meaningful change.
Your journey begins with a single, powerful question:
What legal mystery are you eager to unravel?
This process of discovery is only the first step. Stay tuned for part two, where we will dive into the next phase: developing a compelling thesis that brings clarity and focus to your research and sets the stage for impactful scholarship.
Becoming Full,
P.S. As always, thank you for reading this week’s issue of The Tenure Track. If you found this article helpful, I encourage you to share it with a colleague or friend who might benefit from these insights. Together, let’s continue to build a supportive and creative academic community.