California Law Review is the flagship legal publication at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. Founded in 1912, CLR publishes six times annually on a variety of engaging topics in legal scholarship. The journal is edited and published entirely by students at Berkeley Law.

California Law Review was the first student law journal published west of Illinois and the ninth law review in the United States. The chief architects of CLR were turn-of-the-century California progressives who saw the journal as a vehicle for reform. Editor-in-Chief and later Dean of Berkeley Law, Orrin McMurray, envisioned California Law Review as a conduit to “the inevitable development of a western type of jurisprudence.”

Today, California Law Review is among the top law journals in the United States. Over the past century, California Law Review has published some of the most influential pieces of legal scholarship, including The Equal Protection of the Laws by Joseph Tussman and Jacobus tenBroek, 37 Calif. L. Rev. 341 (1949), Privacy by William Prosser, 48 Calif. L. Rev. 383 (1960), Legal Implications of Network Economic Effects by Mark A. Lemley and David McGowan, 86 Calif. L. Rev. 479 (1998), and Law and Behavioral Science: Removing the Rationality Assumption from Law and Economics by Russell B. Korobkin and Thomas S. Ulen, 88 Calif. L. Rev. 1051 (2000). CLR editors have gone on to take leadership positions in the highest levels of government, public interest and business sectors, and academia. Among its alumni are Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Marsha Berzon, California Supreme Court Justices Rose Bird, Roger J. Traynor, Allen Broussard, and Kathryn Werdegar, U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson, Professor Barbara Armstrong, the first female law professor in the United States, and Professor Michael Tigar.

Unique among its peers, CLR has used its reputation to give voice to the most cutting-edge scholarship in legal academia. Pieces such as The Dual Lives of Rights: The Rhetoric and Practice of Rights in America by Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, 98 Calif. L. Rev. 277 (2010), and Masculinity as Prison: Sexual Identity, Race, and Incarceration by Russell K. Robinson, 99 Calif. L. Rev. 1309 (2011), have called into question some of the most basic assumptions in the law. And indeed, with the publication of Silence at the California Law Review by Amy DeVaudreuil, 91 Calif. L. Rev. 1183 (2003), CLR has not shied away from exposing institutional racism in its own ranks. In doing so, CLR embodies the spirit of civic engagement that hallmarks both Berkeley Law and UC Berkeley.