''The Urban Lawyer'' is a quarterly

peer-reviewed Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work (peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review ...

law journal A law review or law journal is a scholarly journal or publication that focuses on legal issues. A law review is a type of legal periodical. Law reviews are a source of research, imbedded with analyzed and referenced legal topics; they also pr ...

and the official publication of the

American Bar Association The American Bar Association (ABA) is a voluntary bar association of lawyers and law students, which is not specific to any jurisdiction in the United States. Founded in 1878, the ABA's most important stated activities are the setting of acad ...

's (ABA) Section of State and Local Government Law. Published in cooperation with the

University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law The University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law is a public law school located on the main campus of the University of Missouri-Kansas City in Kansas City, Missouri, near the Country Club Plaza. It was founded in 1895 as the Kansas Cit ...

, ''The Urban Lawyer'' has the largest circulation of any government law journal in the world.Michael M. Berger, ''The Basics of Inverse Condemnation'', , SU010 ALI-CLE 25 (2012).

Overview

''The Urban Lawyer'' publishes articles, essays, letters, case studies, and book reviews relating to urban legal issues.Alexandra Frank
Hidden Gems of the JSTOR Archive: ''The Urban Lawyer'',
Frequent topics include

land use Land use involves the management and modification of natural environment or wilderness into built environment such as settlements and semi-natural habitats such as arable fields, pastures, and managed woods. Land use by humans has a long h ...

law,

government operations Government spending or expenditure includes all government consumption, investment, and transfer payments. In national income accounting, the acquisition by governments of goods and services for current use, to directly satisfy the individual o ...

environmental law Environmental law is a collective term encompassing aspects of the law that provide protection to the environment. A related but distinct set of regulatory regimes, now strongly influenced by environmental legal principles, focus on the manage ...

public education State schools (in England, Wales, Australia and New Zealand) or public schools (Scottish English and North American English) are generally primary or secondary schools that educate all students without charge. They are funded in whole or in pa ...

public finance Public finance is the study of the role of the government in the economy. It is the branch of economics that assesses the government revenue and government expenditure of the public authorities and the adjustment of one or the other to achie ...

public transportation Public transport (also known as public transportation, public transit, mass transit, or simply transit) is a system of transport for passengers by group travel systems available for use by the general public unlike private transport, typical ...

ethics Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that "involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior".''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' The field of ethics, along with aesthetics, concerns m ...

, and

international law International law (also known as public international law and the law of nations) is the set of rules, norms, and standards generally recognized as binding between states. It establishes normative guidelines and a common conceptual framework for ...

. The journal also hosts symposia on topics relating to urban law and policy. Recent symposia topics have included "Education Reform and Governance," "A 2020 View of Urban Infrastructure," and a "Symposium on Fair Housing Testing." Each year, at least one issue of the journal includes an "Annual Review of the Law," which discusses recent developments in litigation involving urban legal issues. Recent reviews have included, among other subjects, a summary of developments in urban planning law and a summary of developments in education law. The journal also publishes committee reports written by the American Bar Association Section of State and Local Government Law.JoAnne L. Dunec, ''At the Cutting Edge: 2008 Land Use Law from The Urban Lawyer'', 24-FALL 59 (2009). Additionally, the journal publishes "case notes" that summarize recent significant court decisions pertaining to urban law as well as book reviews of recently published books about urban legal issues.

History

In 1968, the American Bar Association's Section of State and Local Government Law decided to replace the Local Government Law Section Newsletter with a full-scale, peer-reviewed law journal to serve as a scholarly forum for "urban legal problem solving." The first volume of the journal was published in 1969, in the wake of what the editors described as "the urban crisis." The founding editors planned for the journal to address "substantive problems common to all local governments such as condemnation, local finance and revenues, special assessments and taxing, planning and zoning."Claud O. Boothman
''Introduction to The Urban Lawyer''
1 v (1969). The Section of State and Local Government Law decided to name the journal "''The Urban Lawyer''" to reflect the fact that "the rapidly increasing shift of our population to urban centers indicates that local governments of the present and future are and will be essentially urban governments."

Impact

With nearly 6,000 hard-copy subscribers and nearly 3,000 online subscribers, the journal is "the largest circulating government law journal in the world." Articles in it have been cited by the

Supreme Court of the United States The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that involve a point o ...

, as well as the

Second The second (symbol: s) is the unit of time in the International System of Units (SI), historically defined as of a day – this factor derived from the division of the day first into 24 hours, then to 60 minutes and finally to 60 seconds ...

Third Third or 3rd may refer to: Numbers * 3rd, the ordinal form of the cardinal number 3 * , a fraction of one third * Second#Sexagesimal divisions of calendar time and day, 1⁄60 of a ''second'', or 1⁄3600 of a ''minute'' Places * 3rd Street (d ...

, Fourth, Sixth,

Seventh Seventh is the ordinal form of the number seven. Seventh may refer to: * Seventh Amendment to the United States Constitution * A fraction (mathematics), , equal to one of seven equal parts Film and television *"The Seventh", a second-season e ...

Ninth In music, a ninth is a compound interval consisting of an octave plus a second. Like the second, the interval of a ninth is classified as a dissonance in common practice tonality. Since a ninth is an octave larger than a second, its ...

, Tenth, and the

Federal Circuit The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (in case citations, Fed. Cir. or C.A.F.C.) is a United States court of appeals that has special appellate jurisdiction over certain types of specialized cases in the U.S. federal court ...

Courts of Appeals. The journal has also been cited by many

state supreme courts In the United States, a state supreme court (known by other names in some states) is the highest court in the state judiciary of a U.S. state. On matters of state law, the judgment of a state supreme court is considered final and binding in ...

. Articles appear in many legal treatises, including

American Jurisprudence ''American Jurisprudence'' (second edition is cited as Am. Jur. 2d) is an encyclopedia of the United States law, published by West. It was originated by Lawyers Cooperative Publishing, which was subsequently acquired by the Thomson Corporation. Th ...

American Law Institute The American Law Institute (ALI) is a research and advocacy group of judges, lawyers, and legal scholars established in 1923 to promote the clarification and simplification of United States common law and its adaptation to changing social needs. ...

, and

Westlaw Westlaw is an online legal research service and proprietary database for lawyers and legal professionals available in over 60 countries. Information resources on Westlaw include more than 40,000 databases of case law, state and federal statute ...

practice guides.

Washington and Lee University , mottoeng = "Not Unmindful of the Future" , established = , type = Private liberal arts university , academic_affiliations = , endowment = $2.092 billion (2021) , president = William C. Dudley , provost = Lena Hill , city = Lexingto ...

's Law Journal Rankings place ''The Urban Lawyer'' among the top ten peer-edited

law journals A law review or law journal is a scholarly journal or publication that focuses on legal issues. A law review is a type of legal periodical. Law reviews are a source of research, imbedded with analyzed and referenced legal topics; they also pr ...

most cited by other journals."Law Journals: Submission and Ranking, 2008-2015,"
Washington & Lee University (Accessed: September 25, 2016). Washington and Lee University's rankings also place the journal among the top fifteen peer-edited law journals by combined score. The journal is also the second-highest rated peer-edited law journal that publishes articles relating to

public policy Public policy is an institutionalized proposal or a decided set of elements like laws, regulations, guidelines, and actions to solve or address relevant and real-world problems, guided by a conception and often implemented by programs. Public p ...

politics Politics (from , ) is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that studies ...

, and the law. In 2014, the journal was called a "hidden gem" of the

JSTOR JSTOR (; short for ''Journal Storage'') is a digital library founded in 1995 in New York City. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now encompasses books and other primary sources as well as current issues of j ...

archive.

Abstracting and indexing

''The Urban Lawyer'' is abstracted or indexed in Academic Search (EbscoHost),

HeinOnline HeinOnline (HOL) is a commercial internet database service launched in 2000 by William S. Hein & Co., Inc. (WSH Co), a Buffalo, New York publisher specializing in legal materials. The company began in Buffalo, New York, in 1961 and is currently b ...

LexisNexis LexisNexis is a part of the RELX corporation that sells data analytics products and various databases that are accessed through online portals, including portals for computer-assisted legal research (CALR), newspaper search, and consumer informa ...

,Washington and Lee University Law Library
''Journal Finder: The Urban Lawyer''
and the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle a ...

's Current Index to Legal Periodicals. Tables of contents are also available through Infotrieve and

Ingenta Ingenta is a provider of content services for the publishing industry, based in Oxford in the United Kingdom. Customers include both academic and trade publishers as well as information providers. Ingenta plc is listed on the Alternative Investm ...

. The American Bar Association also publishes recent articles from the journal on the Section of State and Local Government Law's website.

''At the Cutting Edge: Land Use Law from The Urban Lawyer''

The American Bar Association's Section of State and Local Government Law also publishes a compendium of section committee reports in book form, titled ''At the Cutting Edge: Land Use Law from The Urban Lawyer.'', Online Catalogue
''The Urban Lawyer: Notes''

''Description: At the Cutting Edge 2012: Land Use Law from The Urban Lawyer''
see also
''At the Cutting Edge 2014: Product Description''
This compendium reprints reports on the subject of land use law that were originally published in ''The Urban Lawyer''. The idea for a compendium originated from a 2008 meeting of leaders of the Section of State and Local Government Law, where leaders discussed ways in which scholarship published in ''The Urban Lawyer'' could reach a wider audience. To accomplish this goal, section leaders decided to publish a collection of committee reports in book form, and the first edition of ''At the Cutting Edge'' was released in 2009. The American Bar Association publishes an updated collection of reports on an annual basis.

Most cited articles

According to Westlaw Legal Research Services, the following three articles have been cited most often:, ''Most Cited Articles in "The Urban Lawyer"'' (last visited July 4, 2014). # Daniel R. Mandelker & A. Dan Tarlock
''Shifting the Presumption of Constitutionality in Land-Use Law''
24 1 (1992) # Daniel R. Mandelker
''Investment Backed Expectations in Taking Law''
27 215 (1995) # John J. Delaney & Duane J. Desiderio
''Who Will Clean Up the "Ripeness Mess"? A Call for Reform So Takings Plaintiffs Can Enter the Federal Courthouse''
31 195 (1999)

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Urban Lawyer, The American Bar Association American law journals University of Missouri–Kansas City Publications established in 1969 Quarterly journals English-language journals Peer reviewed law journals