A reader asked Lara:
How frequently do law review editors seek guidance from members of their law faculty when they are trying to decide whether or not to accept an article for publication? I am particularly interested in the practices at top schools.
I am told by sources at Harvard and Yale that the general journals at those schools always ask faculty members to review articles. I know that Stanford sometimes does, and that UCLA very rarely does.
I'd love to know what other journals do -- if you have personal knowledge of how this practice operates on a journal, could you please post the name of the journal and its practice in the comments? Please don't include arguments about what's the best approach, complaints about journals, lawyer jokes, suggestions on how I can make money fa$t, or whatever else in the comments; to make the comments useful, they should just include the name of the journal and a brief summary of its practice. Thanks!
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The main concern was that the faculty members would not be objective in their consultation. That is, many faculty members have an unbending view of the area of law with which they are familiar and that any advice on rejecting or accepting the submitted article would depend entirely on whether they agreed with the viewpoint of the author or article.
Additionally, since many professors in an area of law knew each other, inter-personal dynamic may come into play and that the student-run law review would be unaware.
We balanced this downside with the opposite problem: that many student-run law reviews pick articles without an advanced understanding of the subject matter. Our counter to this, wrong or right, was that if we picked poorly, the academic marketplace would correct the problem through either: (a) not citing the piece or (b) attacking it and discrediting it.
Finally, we were just generally concerned with autonomy. We felt that if we consulted with faculty, it would give the impression that we were incapable (maybe we were) of doing the job on our own, or that we were generally susceptible to influence on a variety of matters.
Anyway, we rejected faculty consultation.
So we have review by professionals in the field, at least two of which are current members of the GW faculty.
Hope that helps,
Alan
Joseph Gratz
Articles Editor
Minnesota Journal of Law, Science, and Technology
At schools that ours the issue is usually not which articles are best, but which articles are publishable.
This is not to say that faculty consultation would necessarily be a bad idea.
Carl Edman, past Executive Articles Editor for both publications
I can answer your question about law review practices, at least as far as what we did on [a top 20 law review] in 2000-2001, where I was Senior Articles Editor.
We had no set procedures -- none -- for asking faculty to review articles. In practice, we often had faculty members review articles in certain fields where we (the Articles Editors) did not think we had sufficient expertise. What this worked out to, was asking faculty members to review articles in corporate and commercial law, and I think some of the best things we published were one article on bankruptcy and another on payment systems that we initially identified as interesting and that struck faculty members as similarly interesting/worthwhile.
The key here is that we only showed articles to faculty members in areas where we knew we lacked expertise. In retrospect, we probably lacked expertise sufficient to judge a really good law review article in almost every area of law, but we thought we knew enough to identify good articles, on our own, in a couple of fields, notably constitutional law and philosophy of law (hah). Which explains why we published two mediocre articles in those fields. . . .
Is it a good practice to have faculty members review every article? I'm not sure. I valued the law review's independence a great deal, and think one of its virtues was forcing us to act as scholarly arbiters, even if we weren't always up to the task. When we did ask faculty members to review articles, we had to guard against logrolling and faculty playing favorites, or attacking articles they didn't like because of politics. And I don't think it is always necessary; there were a few articles we received that we so obviously good and groundbreaking that I pushed for immediate acceptance (I still regret losing an article on corporate governance in Russia).
Oh, and one other point, related to the nature of law reviews. Particularly with articles that looked good at first impression, there was a real push to make an offer fast before the article was picked up by another journal. It is not often easy or fair to walk into a busy professor's office, hand her/him an 80-page article, and say "could you please let me know what you think of this by tomorrow morning?" Faculty just work on different timeframes than do law reviews.