First Editor of the Harvard Law Review

John McKelvey was the first Editor-in-Chief of  The Harvard Law Review

When the Review was founded in 1887, the Harvard Law School had about 200 students and five or six faculty members. The third-year class numbered no more than sixty-five or seventy students. Of them, fifteen were members of the original editorial board of the Law Review. What a group they were! J. McKelvey was most active among the founders, and he was the first Editor-in-Chief. Others on the original Board were Joseph H. Beale, Jr., who wrote an article on “Tickets” in the first issue, and Julian W. Mack—the business manager of the Review—who later served as a distinguished judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The Board also included John H. Wigmore, later Dean of the Northwestern Law School and the author of one of the great treatises on American law, and Bancroft G. Davis, Blewett H. Lee, and George R. Nutter, all later distinguished practitioners. Nutter eventually became a partner of Brandeis in the firm of Brandeis, Dunbar & Nutter, and his name is still carried by the present firm of Nutter, McClennan & Fish.

McKelvey, Mack, and Beale were clearly the moving spirits of the Review. As Beale later recalled, they “went to the faculty with their plan [and] they found differing degrees of warmth in the support offered; but Ames approved without reserve, wrote the first leading article, and became the chief adviser and helper of the editors throughout his life.”

The masthead of the first issue looked much the same as it does now, except that the number of editors has increased enormously. In the first issue, the masthead page included a line which read “Published Monthly, during the Academic Year, by Harvard Law Students.” This has continued through the one hundred volumes with no substantial change. It now reads: “Published eight times during the academic year by Harvard law students.”One item on the first masthead page attracts attention today. It reads: “SUBSCRIPTION PRICE, $2.50 PER ANNUM …35¢ PER NUMBER.”