In my haste to blog a link to my new piece, I overlooked a significant event in the law review world: the debut of the Harvard Law Review Forum. Here’s the official blurb from the Harvard Law Review‘s website:
It has been our experience that short Replies to our Articles often add a great deal of value to the Review, and to the Articles themselves. However, the constraints of the publication process make it impossible for us to publish as many Replies, in as timely a manner, as we would like. The Forum is an online extension of our printed pages that is intended to allow for a more robust scholarly discussion of our Articles.
In addition to allowing us to publish more timely Replies, the Forum also allows scholars to contribute ideas that may not lend themselves to the traditional law review format. To that end, Forum Replies are approximately 3000 words long, and should be lightly footnoted and sourced in comparison to traditional Articles. However, they are subject to the same editorial standards as the material that appears in our printed volume.
Replies appearing in the Forum are permanently published on our website as Adobe PDF files. (We are also working with Lexis and Westlaw to incorporate the Forum into their databases.) The Forum is formatted and paginated like our printed volume, and should be cited as follows: Jane Smith, Reply Title, 119 HARV. L. REV. F. 1 (2005), www.harvardlawreview.org/forum/issues/119/dec05/author.pdf.
The Forum will feature multiple Replies to each Article in the Review. Replies are published on a rolling basis; we invite you to follow the conversations as they unfold.
You can view the initial set of Harvard Law Review Forum replies here. I was particularly interested in the response to my own article by my friend and brand-spanking new law prof Paul Ohm, The Fourth Amendment Right to Delete.
I suppose it’s natural to compare the HLR Forum to the Yale Law Journal’s new site, The Pocket Part. The Yale site is more blog-like; responses are in html, with hyperlinks, and comments are enabled. In contrast, the Harvard site has no comments or hyperlinks, but posts the articles as .pdf documents in that cool HLR font. Plus, the Harvard responses will be available on Westlaw and Lexis. [UPDATE: C.J. Mahoney writes in to add that “The Yale Law Journal is likewise working with Lexis and Westlaw to include Pocket Part content on their databases.”]
Does anyone know if other journals are planning something similar?
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