Posted by Randy Barnett:
A Cri de Coeur of a Law Review Editor:
On [1]Letters of Marque, Heidi Bond makes an excellent point:
I've basically come to the conclusion, after three weeks, that it's
bad for everyone that every single major Law Review gets something
like two thousand submissions a year. It's bad for us, because we
can't get our heads around all the papers, and feel swamped in
guilt. It's bad for law professors, because you have to aim your
articles to be selected by an audience that will give your paper a
cursory look-see. It's bad for people who want to be law professors
because we get so many papers that we must sort using proxies,
which might discriminate. It's bad for legal scholarship, because
when you're picking 15-20 articles out of a thousand, minus the
ones that Yale takes first (grrr!), you look for reasons to reject
papers, many of which might ignore vast fields of scholarship.
I make an effort to put extra time into papers where I know my
understanding of the subject matter is lacking to counteract this
effect. But, quite frankly, law professors, you cannot give a
handful of 2Ls 2000 50 page articles (which, despite the article
length policy, is the lower end of what we're receiving) to
evaluate and then complain that you don't like their selection
criteria.
She then offers this suggestion worth considering:
The easiest, simplest thing the legal profession can do to improve
selection criteria on law reviews is to stop paying for law
professors to submit their articles to every journal under the sun.
It's a prisoner's dilemma -- every individual is better off
submitting to as many journals as possible, but editor's time is a
scarce resource. If we had fewer articles, we could read them all
carefully; we would be able to have a dialog with the author,
instead of a blackbox form-letter rejection; we could take time to
discuss pieces with faculty on a regular basis, instead of a quick
check just before the piece went to a full read. Okay, maybe not
all of those things, but some of them.
On a different note, one of my pet peeves is that student-edited law
reviews are justified by law professors on the grounds that working
with faculty authors educates law review editors, and then, as
authors, professors turn around and complain when they need to educate
law review editors during the editorial process. In other words, it is
OK for faculty members at other schools to educate OUR students, but
highly annoying when we must educate THEIR students. (I think I could
have used an student editor for the last two sentences.)
References
1. http://blog.qiken.org/archives/2005/03/if_its_not_obvi.html
_______________________________________________
Volokh mailing list
[email protected]
http://highsorcery.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/volokh
