ABSTRACT
In order to understand the role of law and lawyers in the publication of American periodicals in the nineteenth century, one must recognize that law was conceived to be a branch of general literature and that law and legal writing were not seen as the province of trained legal professionals. One of the most interesting law journals published in the antebellum period was Livingston's Monthly Law Magazine, published by the New York attorney and legal entrepreneur John Livingston, which flourished during the 1850s and early 1860s. The early nineteenth century saw a "proliferation" of general circulation magazines, so that nearly every town of any consequence in America could boast a weekly literary miscellany of some kind. From the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the twentieth century, specialist law journal publishing flowered. The most important development in legal periodicals in the postwar period was the decision by several law schools to begin publishing their own law reviews.
