About

The Brandywine Review publishes original commentary on American law. Coverage runs across eight practice areas: education law, health and end of life law, environmental and property law, criminal law, courts and procedure, media and speech law, family law, and corporate and securities law. Within each area, a small number of pieces trace how a specific doctrine developed, where courts have split from one another, and what a particular opinion or statute actually says once its own text is read directly rather than through a secondary summary of it.

The publication is edited anonymously. No editorial board, staff list, or named editor is attached to any piece here, and none has been invented for the sake of having one to point to. What stands behind a piece this publication writes itself is not a byline but its sourcing: every citation links to a primary source, a published opinion or the text of a statute, and every holding described here has been checked against that source rather than against a paraphrase of it.

For the commentary this publication writes on its own initiative, subjects are chosen for genuine doctrinal tension rather than for novelty or timeliness. Within that commentary, a question earns a place in one of the eight sections when courts disagree with each other on a live issue, when a governing standard was left deliberately open by the court that wrote it, or when a state's own courts read that state's constitution differently from how a neighboring state reads an identically worded clause. The goal in each case is to explain what the disagreement actually turns on, in language a practicing lawyer can use, rather than to predict how any pending matter will come out.

That approach shows up across the site's range. A voucher program survives a challenge in one state and fails an equivalent challenge in another, and the difference traces to a single clause in two different state constitutions. A reprieve power older than the pardon power itself gets tested in litigation that asks what it lets a governor do. A rule meant to make a fractured Supreme Court opinion usable produces, on inspection, a durable disagreement among the circuits about what the rule itself requires. Each piece here follows one of these threads from the source that created it to the open question a practitioner working in that area has to navigate today.

This is not a review of pending litigation. The commentary this editorial process writes on its own initiative is not paid for and carries no byline; a piece that arrives from outside that process and runs here is identified as a contribution rather than folded in as though it were the same thing. The standards that govern sourcing, verification, and how a correction is handled once an error is found are set out in full on the page describing how this publication is put together. A question about a specific piece, a proposed contribution, or a subject not yet covered here can be raised through the page listing how to reach the editors.