History of the Review

The first periodical published within the Law School at The University of Melbourne was The Summons. It appeared with the subtitle ‘A Magazine of Legal and General Literature’, and was published by the Articled Law Clerks’ Society of Victoria between 1891 and 1903.

In 1935, the Law Students’ Society of Victoria began publishing Res Judicatae, which became one of the leading law journals in Australia.

The journal was renamed the Melbourne University Law Review in 1957. Sir Zelman Cowen, the then Dean of the Law School (and later Governor-General of Australia), modelled the Review on the Harvard Law Review, which had been run by law students since it commenced publication in 1887. The Melbourne University Law Review has remained entirely student-run since its establishment.

In recent years, the Review has undergone some significant changes. The Review was typeset outside the Law School until 1994, when it was produced in-house for the first time. From 1998, the number of editions published each year was increased from two to three. In 1998, the Melbourne University Law Review Association published the Australian Guide to Legal Citation, which provides Australia with a uniform system of legal citation, akin to the Bluebook in the United States and the Canadian Guide to Legal Citation in Canada. The second edition of the Australian Guide to Legal Citation was published in early 2002.