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That's too bad!  I published in Michigan's books issue a couple of years ago and found it a wonderful experience.  I hope they'll beef up next year and in the years to come.  I've flogged this issue before, as has the Faculty Lounge, but I continue to think book reviews are among the most useful, and certainly the most economical (even in their lengthy, law review-style form, which is still far shorter and less bloated than the typical leading article) and readable and engaging parts of the modern law review.  I continue to hope more reviews can be encouraged to publish reviews and review essays, and for that reason I hope this year's slim book review issue is an aberration.  

I wonder a little whether the decline in book reviews in the law review world is in part a response to the Westlaw-ization of the law review, in which all articles are so many random searchable bits floating in a Boolean pond.  Law review editors who may well have spent little or no time looking at physical copies of law reviews may not think much about how to shape a law review issue as an issue, with an accompanying interest in having it be a good "book," with an appealingly diverse and readable mix of genres.  Maybe I'm a fossil, or I'm unduly influenced by my journalism background and my love of magazines, with their "front-of-the-book," feature, and "back-of-the-book" format; but I still like a good law review issue, one that has a mix of diversity, coherence, and elegance in formation and presentation.  Book reviews, along with longer articles, shorter essays, short comments, and so on, are a valuable part of that mix, aside from their own intrinsic merits.  Any thoughts on my theory?  

Incidentally, the Faculty Lounge post I link to above has a further link to a list of law reviews that have recently published review essays.