The Harvard Law Review is a journal of legal scholarship published by an independent student group at Harvard Law School.

According to the 2008 Journal Citation Reports, the Review is the most cited law review and has the second-highest impact factor in the category "law" after the Columbia Law Review. It is published monthly from November through June, with the November issue dedicated to covering the previous year's Supreme Court Term. The Review is also published online. In addition, it publishes the online-only Harvard Law Review Forum, a rolling journal of scholarly responses to the main journal's content.

The Harvard Law Review Association, in conjunction with the Columbia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal, publishes the Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, a widely followed authority for legal citation formats in the United States.

The Harvard Law Review published its first issue on April 15, 1887, and is the oldest operating student-edited law review in the United States. The establishment of the journal was largely due to the support of Louis Brandeis, then a recent Harvard Law School alumnus and Boston attorney who would later go on to become a Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. The first female editor of the Review was Priscilla Holmes (1953-1955, Volumes 67-68); the first woman to serve as the Review's president was Susan Estrich (1978) who went on to become active in Democratic Party politics and the youngest woman to receive tenure at Harvard Law School; its first minority president was Raj Marphatia (1987, Volume 101), who is now a partner at the Boston law firm of Ropes & Gray; its first African-American president was Barack Obama (1991); its first openly gay president is current president Mitchell Reich (2011).

A law review (or law journal) is a scholarly journal focusing on legal issues, normally published by an organization of students at a law school or through a bar association. The term is also used to describe the extracurricular activity at law schools of publishing the journal.

Law reviews should not be confused with non-scholarly publications such as the New York Law Journal or The American Lawyer, which are independent, professional newspapers and news-magazines that cover the daily practice of law (see legal periodical).

The University of Pennsylvania Law Review is the oldest law review in the U.S., having published continuously since 1852. Also among the oldest and most storied law review publications are the Albany Law Review, successor to the Albany Law School Journal, which began in 1875 and was the nation's first student-edited law review; the Columbia Law Review, successor to the Columbia Jurist, beginning in 1885; the Harvard Law Review, beginning in 1887;Yale Law Journal, beginning in 1891; West Virginia Law Review, beginning in 1894; and Dickinson Law Review, beginning in 1897. The first law review originating outside of the Northeast was the Michigan Law Review, beginning in 1902; followed by the Northwestern University Law Review, beginning in 1906; and the Kentucky Law Journal, beginning in 1910. The California Law Review, beginning in 1912, was the nation's first law review published west of Illinois.

Barack Hussein Obama II (ⁱ/bəˈrɑːk huːˈseɪn oʊˈbɑːmə/; born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. In January 2005, Obama was sworn in as a U.S. Senator in the state of Illinois. He would hold this office until November 2008, when he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.

Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004.

Following an unsuccessful bid against the Democratic incumbent for a seat in the United States House of Representatives in 2000, Obama ran for the United States Senate in 2004. Several events brought him to national attention during the campaign, including his victory in the March 2004 Illinois Democratic primary for the Senate election and his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He won election to the U.S. Senate in Illinois in November 2004. His presidential campaign began in February 2007, and after a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination. In the 2008 presidential election, he defeated Republican nominee John McCain, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine months later, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In April 2011, he announced that he would be running for re-election in 2012.