Title: The Law Review Article Selection Process: Results from a National Study
Abstract: I. INTRODUCTION In mid-1990s, topic of student-edited law review was very much on minds of legal scholars and law review editors. In 1994, University of Chicago Review published a series of essays addressing role of students in law review publication process. (1) The following year, Stanford Review conducted a law review conference entitled Law Review Conference. (2) Although there were many calls for further research into functioning of law review, (3) few, if any, studies were undertaken or published as a result. (4) After nearly a decade of relative dormancy, topic appears to be active again. In December 2004, Harvard Review conducted a survey of nearly 800 law school faculty, almost ninety percent of whom agreed that articles were, in general, too long. (5) Judge Posner, keynote speaker at Stanford conference, has returned to fray, removing his action from pages of law reviews themselves to more generally-circulated Legal Affairs. (6) And once again, student editors have felt need to defend themselves against onslaught of criticism. (7) But still there has been little serious study of this important but widely-criticized institution. Though critics complain about process, their understanding of how legal journals decide to publish is generally limited to their own experiences, either as editors when they were in law school or as authors. It was against this backdrop that we designed our survey and circulated it to editors at about 400 (8) student-edited law reviews (9) asking a set of questions designed to peel back curtain that has shrouded article selection process. We received 191 responses from 163 different journals. (10) Though, as might be expected from an exploratory survey, results raise at least as many questions as they answer, we hope that introduction of significant empirical data into debate can refocus conversation about how best to structure changing world of legal Our Article proceeds in four parts. Part II places our survey in its proper context by reviewing some of criticisms of student-edited law review, particularly with regard to article selection, that have been raised in published literature. Part III provides an overview of our methodology, both for survey itself and for our statistical analysis. Part IV reviews quantitative results of our analysis and examines they tell us about selection process. Part V briefly summarizes findings we consider to be most salient and discusses their implications. II. THE CRITICISMS OF THE STUDENT-EDITED LAW REVIEW The subject of student-edited law review has generated far more than its share of published invective. While scholars' discontent with institution is unsurprising given its importance to progress of their careers (no doubt there is much grumbling behind closed doors about activities of tenure and promotion committees as well), it is unusual that so much of grumbling about law reviews takes place in public and is printed by law reviews themselves. A few examples will serve to highlight level of disdain that institution of student-edited law review receives from its detractors: * Professor James Lindgren opens his essay on subject with a section entitled Crimes Against Humanity that begins [o]ur scholarly journals are in hands of incompetents; (11) * Professor Bernard Hibbitts complains that the concept of law students exercising quality control over legal scholarship borders on oxymoronic; (12) and * Judge Richard Posner finds that what is wrong is law reviews' failure, and perhaps inability, to adapt to changing nature of American law and American legal scholarship. (13) Although most vitriolic of criticism has been directed at line-editing process and perceived atrocities of law review style, (14) it is in article selection process that student editors wield greatest power over scholars. …
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-03-22
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 5
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