For Caleb Rogers, serving as editor-in-chief of the Washington University Law Review is both a leadership opportunity and a chance to help shape the scholarship the journal publishes. A third-year law student, Rogers is leading Volume 104 while preparing for a career in commercial finance.
Founded in 1915, the student-run academic journal publishes six issues a year and features articles by legal scholars and practitioners as well as student-written notes and comments.
Here, Rogers discusses the journal’s approach to selecting articles, the work of its editors and the projects he hopes will have a lasting impact.
What drew you to the Law Review, and what have you learned from serving as editor-in-chief?
I really enjoy my job as editor. I get to work with a lot of incredible people on the board. I love editing the articles. People think of Law Review as being a lot of technical editing, and it is, but there’s also lots of substantive work that happens.
It has been fantastic seeing the articles team work together. There’s sort of a ‘Breakfast Club’ vibe going on. They work together very closely in the first couple months of the spring semester, because that’s when our article submission season is. It’s great to see seven people who didn’t really know each other at the time come together as a group. They have brought many different perspectives to the table when reviewing those substantive articles.
Rising 2Ls are selected for Law Review via a write-on competition each May, or August, for transfer students, which involves completing a Bluebooking (technical editing) exercise and writing a case comment from a closed universe of sources. Then, board members, including the editor-in-chief, are selected by the incumbent board through an application and interview process over winter break. So, Volume 103’s board interviewed and then selected Volume 104’s board in December 2025/January 2026. Work on Volume 104 then started pretty immediately.
How does the Law Review decide which articles to publish?
Most of our pieces — our articles, our commentary pieces, our online edition pieces — are submitted through a platform called Scholastica that almost every law journal uses. Law professors, folks on the job market and practitioners will submit pieces and then we review them.
For articles, which are longer, 25,000-word pieces, we have a committee of seven articles editors that selects pieces they think are worth being read by a group. Our chief articles editor will select a smaller number of those pieces for a table read, and that’s when the articles committee digests the whole piece in thorough detail. They discuss the piece and vote on whether or not to give it an offer.
The table read is a blind review process. That helps us focus on good scholarship, rather than being influenced by an author’s name or title.
Our pieces generally go through four rounds of editing after they’re accepted — a substantive edit by an articles editor; a technical edit, focused primarily on pulling and confirming cited sources but also looking for Bluebook and Chicago Manual of Style compliance, done by a team of staff editors under the direction of an executive editor; a technical edit of the whole piece, looking primarily for compliance with the Bluebook and the Chicago Manual of Style, done by a senior executive editor; and a final technical edit of the whole piece, done by me.
Our general approach is to only accept pieces that we consider substantively publishable as accepted. Our authors are the subject-matter experts on the substance and we’re well aware that we lack the depth of knowledge in some of the subject areas at issue. We focus our energy on ensuring that claims are appropriately sourced and that citations and grammar are up to snuff.
What are some of the projects or accomplishments you’re most excited about?
On the substantive side, in terms of actually publishing pieces, we landed a really cool article by Anne Joseph O’Connell (a law professor at Stanford University) and Daniel Farber of the University of California, Berkeley. It’s an administrative law piece that looks at the Biden administration and the first couple years of the Trump administration and how the standard story of administrative law doesn’t really match administrative practice. It turns out, the sorts of things we learn in class that are characteristic of administrative law don’t actually describe administrative law that happens on the ground.
I think it’s pretty rare that you get an article that is both timely and timeless. There’s always the risk that you’ll get something that’s timely, but then our editing process takes four months, and so it can be stale by the time it actually hits the market. I think this piece really hits a nice middle ground.
The other thing I would say is our website has been quite outdated for a while. We have identified a vendor that will be working on a redesign for us. I’m really excited about how it’s going. One of the tough things about an organization that has a leader for a year at a time is that it’s hard to sustain some of the longer-term projects. It’s been great to see a long-term win happen while I’m in the big chair.
