Scribes has almost 2,700 members, including state and federal judges, practicing lawyers, law-school deans and professors, and legal editors.
The initial circulation was 3,000 copies; its editor in chief was Bryan Garner, then a young law-school professor at the University of Texas.
[4] From 2001 through 2013, the editor in chief was Professor Joseph Kimble, who is widely known for his plain-language advocacy and his work restyling the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and Evidence.
[7] Its distribution exceeds 6,000 copies, and it has published articles by some of the best-known figures in legal writing, including Bryan Garner, Joseph Kimble, Charles Alan Wright, Judge Richard Posner, Lawrence M. Friedman, Richard Wydick, Reed Dickerson, Dean Darby Dickerson, Irving Younger, Steven Stark, Ken Adams,[8] Ross Guberman,[9] and Wayne Schiess.
[2] Volume 13 of the Scribes Journal featured the transcripts of interviews with justices of the United States Supreme Court.
[11] Originally it was used for membership updates and organizational news, but today it also includes shorter pieces about legal writing and publishing.
[2] The editor of The Scrivener is Professor Maureen Kordesh of UIC John Marshall Law School, The University of Illinois at Chicago.
Forty years later, the book was reissued under the title Classic Essays on Legal Advocacy, published by The Lawbook Exchange in Clark, New Jersey.
Volunteer legal-writing professors and attorneys review the submissions and nominate the finalists to the Scribes selection committee.
Each year, any law student who won best brief in a regional or national moot-court competition may submit the brief to Scribes, which then honors the best of the best.
In 2007, Scribes participated in the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools in Washington, D.C., where it presented a panel discussion on "Jury Instructions in Plain English."
Today, membership has grown to almost 2,700 members, including state and federal judges, practicing lawyers, law-school deans and professors, and legal editors.