Race, Gender, and the Harvard Law Review: Christine Hurt offers some thoughts over at The Conglomerate.

  UPDATE: Don't miss this comment by former HLR Articles Editor Nate Oman explaining the articles selection process.

More on Gender and the Harvard Law Review: Over at The Conglomerate, Christine Hurt is looking into why recent Volumes of the Harvard Law Review have mostly published the works of male authors. One obvious trend in the HLR's publication track, Christine notes, is the very strong preference for articles in constitutional law:

Given the roughly equal numbers of female to male assistant professors, I would suspect that law reviews receive an equal number of papers authored by men and women. So, does a ConLaw bias have gender effects? Or a bias toward well-known, established authors? These numbers roughly correlate with the percentage of female full professors.

  That raises an interesting question — do law reviews receive a roughly equal number of papers authored by men and women? Christine assumes so, but I am less sure. I remember my reaction when I first saw Brian Leiter's 2002 list of the most-cited law professors who entered teaching since 1992: to my surprise, every one of the top 20 most cited professors in that list is male. There are a number of possible explanations for that rather troubling (at least to me) result, but one might be a difference between the sheer number of submissions from men and women, either generally or in the smaller category of more prolific academics.

  VC readers, what are your thoughts? I would be particularly interested to hear from former or current articles editors who may remember (or remember the absence of) any such trend. As always, civil and respectful comments only.