I love reading law review articles, and I think that is in large part because being forced to write in part for a generalist audience and student editors pushes authors to do a number of ultimately positive things in our writing and scholarship.  Over time, and based on my reading of articles I thought had terrific introductions, I’ve collected some guiding thoughts for myself about best practices I try to employ when I construct an introduction.  I have sketched these out below.  Some of these are specific points for inclusion in the introduction, others are features of a good article that manifest in the introduction.

I first developed this as a bullet point list for myself, then expanded a bit for colleagues, then flushed it out to share with fellows in the American Bar Association’s Administrative Law Fellowship program.  In the spirit of that program, which seeks to break down barriers to entry into legal academia, I am giving the list a public, accessible home.  These are just the views of one law professor, but I have been told they are helpful by others.  I have also personally found them helpful, and they guided my writing as I successfully navigated the law review submission cycle eight times in the last four years.

1. Tight as a drum.  What I see again and again in great papers is that they are tight as a drum conceptually, structurally, and stylistically.  Among other things, this means a clearly stated thesis (this seems to come by the third paragraph, in no more than a sentence that can actually have the word “thesis” in it).  It also means a structure that makes sense/seems to fit together to develop/support and/or explore the implications of the thesis.  The thesis is like a seed and the entire article should grow out of and around it naturally.  Your readers are lawyers and they want to know specifically what you intend to show and how you intend to show it.  I find that whatever the hypothesis I start out with, it usually takes me several drafts and a lot of research and hair pulling to find my thesis, and I need to do so to tighten the whole piece into a coherent and natural whole. 
2. Tension.  My Emory colleague Fred Smith taught me that a good article (and introduction) usually has some kind of tension—a gap in the literature, a mistaken assumption in the literature, some kind of problem no one has solved.  This is sometimes done through a story/narrative at the beginning. 
3. Consider a story.  This is something different, but my former Penn State Dickinson colleague Medha Makhlouf introduced me to this great article on the “three act article”: https://scholarship.richmond.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2092&context=law-faculty-publications.  I don’t necessarily follow it to the letter but I found it very helpful, especially for thinking about developing tension and framing the background.  Sometimes a good Part I is actually something that’s obvious to me but key for framing things for the reader, or that some people would put in the intro.  In the structure of the article, it develops the tension.  This is also often the “starting point” for the narrative of your article/introduction.  I was slow in learning this; my usual instinct is to start the reader where I started, which is something like in media res, rather than first setting the scene for them in which my intervention matters. 
4. Real-world stakes.  This one is easier to forget.  A paragraph, somewhere in the intro, that starts with words like “the stakes here are very real” (or something like that) and then tells the reader a bit about the real-world stakes, including not only statistics but real human experience.  Are ten lives on the line?  Ten million?  Ten dollars?  Ten billion?  How about an example of someone who was hurt (or helped).  This is usually very easy for a person working on an issue to write, but also easily forgotten if it does not have a clear fit in the logic of the argument.  It is still important.  The stakes may not have a place in the analysis but they help motivate, they are often why we write—so we might as well share.
5. Preemption and its dialectic counterpart, engagement with (place in and connection to) the literature.  Editors are worried about preemption and other scholars want to know where you think your article fits in the literature (I think that editors should check for both preemption and engagement, but that is another story).  Often a good introduction will do this work for the reader—both saying where the piece fits into the literature and explaining that it is novel (doing only the latter is OK but not as good).  I personally try to do this with above-the-line sentences stating the conclusion about novelty and engagement, and then thicker footnotes heavily and transparently supporting those claims.  I strive here not only for honesty but telling the readers why I think I’m novel by reference to specific lines of scholarship that come close but don’t quite address the issue, as I think there is a lot of justifiable skepticism about “I’m the first” novelty claims.
6. Topical connection.  Some connection to current events.  Not merely reacting to something that just happened or framing the paper as a reaction paper, but connecting to something that is in the news or will be.  For example, if I was writing a national security paper right now (July 2024), I would make sure to explain how my arguments are relevant to Ukraine—but I would also be careful to keep this to a sentence or paragraph, not making the whole piece about Ukraine, as scholarship ordinarily aspires to reveal overarching truths that extend beyond any one case (with some important exceptions I have not tried my hand at yet).
7. Careful with terminology and categories (and support any theoretical gerrymanders).  This is the flip side of “tight as a drum” and, I think, key to getting there.  Everyone who studies “substantive due process” doctrine learns that the level of generality at which a right is defined often determines the analysis of whether it is “fundamental” or not.  Is it the right to abortion or the right to reproductive autonomy?  Normative, political, and historical analyses often turn on the level of generality.  Legal scholarship also has a level of generality problem.  Artificially narrow, broad, or gerrymandered categories can produce illusory analyses that hold up only within the artificial lines drawn by the analyzer, and break down in the messy, real world.  So, too, apparent novelty is often a result of the author’s theoretical gerrymandering.  I think that readers recognize this and have an innate suspicion of artificial categories of analysis, especially when they take the form of jargon.  The introduction is the place to introduce the terms that will shape the analysis to the reader, and it is important to explain why the author selected the units of analysis they did—either because they occur naturally or already in doctrine, or otherwise because their boundaries are normatively and theoretically defensible.  For example, in my first article (which I wrote in practice and do not think holds up today), I analyzed some normative arguments about whether there should be a heightened pleading standard for class actions.  The article never explains why is it focused only on pleading, not other threshold procedural barriers (especially summary judgment).  The article also never explains why it is focused only on class actions, and not other forms of aggregation—or other drivers of litigation (multi-district litigation, litigation financing, etc.).  Nor does it explain whether or how a “special” pleading rule applicable for class actions could be defended despite the costs that come with tailoring—or why, for that matter, if the pleading rule for “class actions” should be tailored to the normative issues they raise, it should not be further tailored based on the type of class action, by the area of substantive law at issue, or even based on the facts of specific cases.  In retrospect, much of the article’s analysis is an artifact of its somewhat arbitrary categories of analysis, and its weaknesses stem from my failure to be careful about the categories selected for analysis upfront.
8. Consider the reader’s perspective: When I am revising, I try to consider the reader’s perspective.  The author is deep in the weeds of their paper, the reader is not.  The goal of an article is to transfer the author’s knowledge to the reader, this is easier said than done.  One of the hardest stages of drafting an article is determining how best to present information to the reader to make it understandable and comprehensible.  My guiding takeaway/philosophy for this review is—I imagine that I picked one of my students and gave them ten minutes to read my introduction, then gave them a pop quiz on my paper, asking (1) what is my thesis, (2) what are the stakes, (3) how do I prove my thesis, and (4) where does my paper fit in the literature?  If I don’t think that a typical student would pass that quiz, I need to adjust the content of my introduction and perhaps paper, tighten, restructure, etc., to get there.  For that matter, imagine I gave a colleague 10 minutes to skim my intro before a talk (which is usually all you can expect)—same questions, could they understand the thesis/stakes/how I prove thesis/where I fit in literature?  For the colleague I’d also ask—can they quickly identify where in the content of the paper they should dig to see how I address whatever question jumps out to them as most important?  The upshot is (1) the introduction winds up being sort of *about* the article, instead of being *the beginning of* the article and (2) revising the introduction to make it readable often requires restructuring the article and even additional research to develop/build out a new part.

I will turn on “moderated comments” (or try to) in case any readers have corrections, additional suggestions, or other material to share with scholars who come across this list. And if you read this and found it helpful I’d love comments letting me know that, too!