In early June, I posted an item about “a faculty edited journal that basically accepted [my colleague Stephen Bainbridge]’s piece and then in fairly short order withdrew the acceptance, apparently with no justification, offering ‘scrambled communications’ as the only excuse.” I didn’t know the name of the journal, since Prof. Bainbridge hadn’t posted it.
I just received a message from my friend Ross Davies, who’s a professor at George Mason and the editor-in-chief of the Green Bag, which turns out to be the journal involved:
Somehow (and strangely, since I am an irregular but frequent VC reader) I missed until just now your June 9 post on Law Review Shenanigans, This Time from a Faculty-Edited Journal. Having failed to speak when the post first went up, it might not be useful to chime in now when no one is listening. If you think it’s worth it, though, you could quote me as follows:
Professor Bainbridge is quite right to be annoyed. He is also very kind to leave out the fact that the journal in question is the Green Bag, of which I am the editor-in-chief. I think, however, that it would be better to let the sun shine on (and the market respond to) the fact that the Bag treated an author shabbily. I just hope it doesn’t scare off too many other good people. As I said, the Green Bag did treat Bainbridge poorly. All I can say in defense of the journal is that we good reasons for what we did — reasons that were purely internal to the Green Bag and had nothing to do with Bainbridge (a fine person and scholar, to the best of my knowledge) or his work (also fine). We’ll do our level best not to make the same mistakes again. And the fact that the world — or at least a substantial slice of a relevant part of it — now knows of our capacity to be boorish should be a useful goad to better behavior in the future.
I thought this to be quite a gracious answer, which I’m happy to post.