In Praise of Book Reviews

This is the third time in as many years that the Michigan Law Review has presented a substantial canvass of legal and law-relevant literature to its readers. Any institutional practice repeated three times is in a fair way of becoming a tradition, and the tradition of an annual “book-review issue” in this journal seems vigorously alive and well. Accordingly, the present collection of review essays requires no benediction from me. That these remarks are a work of supererogation is even more strongly suggested when one recalls the elegant essay of David Cavers, which helped launch the first collection two years ago. Perhaps the most useful service my comments can offer is to induce a few readers who missed it to search out and read Professor Cavers’s earlier article.