On Letters of Marque, Heidi Bond makes an excellent point:
I’ve basically come to the conclusion, after three weeks, that it’s bad for everyone that every single major Law Review gets something like two thousand submissions a year. It’s bad for us, because we can’t get our heads around all the papers, and feel swamped in guilt. It’s bad for law professors, because you have to aim your articles to be selected by an audience that will give your paper a cursory look-see. It’s bad for people who want to be law professors because we get so many papers that we must sort using proxies, which might discriminate. It’s bad for legal scholarship, because when you’re picking 15-20 articles out of a thousand, minus the ones that Yale takes first (grrr!), you look for reasons to reject papers, many of which might ignore vast fields of scholarship.
I make an effort to put extra time into papers where I know my understanding of the subject matter is lacking to counteract this effect. But, quite frankly, law professors, you cannot give a handful of 2Ls 2000 50 page articles (which, despite the article length policy, is the lower end of what we’re receiving) to evaluate and then complain that you don’t like their selection criteria.
She then offers this suggestion worth considering:
The easiest, simplest thing the legal profession can do to improve selection criteria on law reviews is to stop paying for law professors to submit their articles to every journal under the sun. It’s a prisoner’s dilemma — every individual is better off submitting to as many journals as possible, but editor’s time is a scarce resource. If we had fewer articles, we could read them all carefully; we would be able to have a dialog with the author, instead of a blackbox form-letter rejection; we could take time to discuss pieces with faculty on a regular basis, instead of a quick check just before the piece went to a full read. Okay, maybe not all of those things, but some of them.
On a different note, one of my pet peeves is that student-edited law reviews are justified by law professors on the grounds that working with faculty authors educates law review editors, and then, as authors, professors turn around and complain when they need to educate law review editors during the editorial process. In other words, it is OK for faculty members at other schools to educate OUR students, but highly annoying when we must educate THEIR students. (I think I could have used an student editor for the last two sentences.)
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