in response to some top law reviews' call for avoiding the really long pieces? Orin posted about this some months ago, and said: "We'll get an idea of the answer in a year or two, when the new articles come out and readers can see whether they are on average shorter than the articles in recent years."

Here's an early data point: Jean-Gabriel Bankier of Berkeley Electronic Press's ExpressO submission service -- a service that I use routinely, and much like -- reports that, based on "more than 1,000 unique submissions in both 2004 and 2005," the averages were:

2003-69.1 pages
2004-73.3 pages
2005-64.0 pages

There are obviously all sorts of possible confounding factors -- for instance, as time goes on, presumably the user base of ExpressO shifts from the early adopters to people who are more representative of law professors (and some lawyers and law students) more generally; perhaps that helps account for the change in page count. Still, I thought I'd pass it along, for whatever it's worth.