Last week, a reader asked Law Review Lara whether The Little People can ever get to publish in Top 20 journals. Lara answered yes, though it’s hard even for well-established lawprofs to get placed there, and there is some discrimination (though not 100% rejection) facing authors who aren’t lawprofs, judges, or other notables.
Adam Sofen from the Yale Law Journal reported on that journal’s policy, which Lara’s contacts say is similar to the one at the Harvard Law Review (though I believe not at most other Top 20 journals):
[H]ere at the Yale Law Journal, article submissions are typically reviewed blind — meaning that the voting members of the committee usually don’t know the name of the author nor his or her institutional affiliations until after the piece is voted on. Moreover, all pieces are sent, blind, to faculty member for review before acceptance. One exception is that if a piece comes from younger, untenured faculty member, the person floating the article will often disclose that fact — as a point in their favor.
Of the first four issues we’ve published this year, our non-student authors come from the following schools: Cardozo (3), George Mason (2), Chicago (1), George Washington (1), Iowa (1), NYU (1), Wash U-St. Louis (1), Yale (1). . . . No non-professor authors, but if we got a good piece, we’d be thrilled to publish it. . . .
I think the biggest advantage that brand-name law professors have in the selection process is not that law reviews are dying to publish yet another piece by, say, Cass Sunstein, but that . . . professors who publish time and again come to have a clear idea of how to present their pieces so as to appeal to law review editors. That goes for everything from the organization of ideas to the formatting on the page. Practice, unsurprisingly, helps. . . .
The anonymity is not complete, at least at Yale:
Each member of the [articles or essays] committee gets his or her share of the stack each week, and chooses one or two pieces to float to the whole committee at twice-weekly meetings. They
have discretion about which pieces to float — it’s possible some members could be using name and school to help sort, but . . . it was my experience that most committee members had no preference for established authors, and some preference for novice ones. The only exception is that, by tradition, Yale faculty members get automatic floats. (This is an advantage but not an overwhelming one, and there were many, many Yale pieces we didn’t take this year.)
Moreover, the anonymity may be relaxed when an expedite request is submitted; that’s what I’m told happens, at least in some measure, at the Harvard Law Review, for instance, I’m told that people do know the author’s identity once one sends in a request for an expedited review. Moreover, sometimes an article may reveal the author’s identity in various hard-to-obscure ways. Nonetheless, my sense is that both the Yale Law Journal and the Harvard Law Review try hard to make the process as anonymous as possible, and do indeed publish people from relatively low-ranked schools.
Also, some people have theorized that Yale, Harvard, and the like won’t even look at an article until they get a request for an expedited review — i.e., until the article has already been accepted at some other journal. Not so, says Mr. Sofen, and my Harvard contact confirms that this so there, too. Sofen writes:
The committee members try to attend to pieces in approximately the order they come in the door. Expedites do typically get pieces a second look, but by the middle of April or so, virtually every piece of any quality has some kind of expedite attached, so that’s not much help. The top-20 journals have shorter expedite periods, of course, so those force themselves on your attention faster. But, really, the only way to deal with the crush is (1) to spend an enormous, enormous amount of time reading submissions, (2) to learn to read quickly, and (3) to begin to figure out what sort of pieces won’t clear the bar, period. For example, we get a not-inconsiderable number of submissions that deal with the laws of individual states. It’s not plausible that YLJ is going to publish, say, a roundup of recent family-law decisions in Arizona, so the editors don’t spend much time with those sorts of pieces. But people persist in sending us reams of them.
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