Over at The Conglomerate, Gordon Smith offers thoughts on the ethics of expedited review of law review articles. My own view is that the standard should be author good faith: authors should only request an expedited review if they genuinely believe it is likely they would accept an offer at the expedited journal over the preexisting offer. I also think that staging is considered ethical; in my experience, journal editors expect it. Journals that don’t want authors to try to shop up following an expedited review do what the Columbia Law Review does: they have a very short time period in which to decide on the offer, such as Columbia’s one hour.
UPDATE: One way of solving this problem Gordon identifies would be to have each author submit a ranking preference before the article goes out, such that the author is locked in to accepting the offer from the journal that they have ranked highest on their list. The problem with this is that preferences may not be fixed. Variables such as copyright policies, the timing of the editing process, whether the article will be published a lead article or essay, whether the journals wants to publish responses to the article, and many other factors can influence an author’s preferences. For the most part, the author has no idea of these factors until the offer comes through, making ex ante ranking difficult.
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