Who would have imagined that National Public Radio, the Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek all would have carried stories on a subject as mundane as performance reviews? Who would have dreamed that a behavioral scientist in Boston, Charles S. Jacobs, and a management professor in Los Angeles, Samuel A. Culbert, would have published books within a year of each other that argue against performance reviews?

As a practitioner of management-side employment law who has been anti-performance review for many years, I am delighted. I never imagined that the debate would be so publicly engaged, or that the arguments for the elimination of this unproductive practice that consumes so much time and results in so much angst for so many would be so well-supported. In this article, I add my vote to the argument that performance reviews should be relegated to the recycling bin, and I offer the legal reasons why....