In his post below, Sasha links to the new website, LegalWorkShop.Org, which will post very short versions of published law review articles from participating law reviews. Larry Solum and Brian Leiter liken it to a Reader’s Digest version; I would update that to the 21st Century and say it forces each scholar to reproduce his or her article as a long blog post.
On the whole, I think it’s a good experiment. At its best, it may help articles become better known within the scholarly community. When an article is 60 pages long, it’s tempting for many to read the introduction, pick through a few sections, and feel that you have the basic gist of it. Most readers won’t actually read it cover-to-cover unless it’s unusually interesting or on an issue they’re following particularly closely. More people will read short summaries, especially if they are reasonably complete, and that will help get the ideas out.
Plus, authors forced to write a three-page version of their article are likely to express their ideas with more clarity and force than they do in a 60-page version. It may be that the short versions become valuable not only for their brevity but for their clarity. Consider the perspective of a casebook author looking to excerpt part of an article for a casebook. It is often hard to find the core argument of an article expressed clearly and quickly in the article itself. On the other hand, it may be much easier to find that in the Legal Workshop version. If so, it’s all for the good.
At the same time, I’m not entirely sure the experiment will work. First, I doubt the public will be very much interested. A short article about an esoteric legal topic is still an article about an esoteric legal topic. Second, many authors try to give the three-page explanation of the article in the introduction already. If the introduction to an article already does much of the work of the LegalWorkshop version, it’s not clear the latter will be worth the extra effort to authors and journals.
Still, on the whole I think it’s a useful experiment. Worth watching.