Comments on Documenting the Decline of (Print) Law Reviews

• Posted by Larry on February 2, 2009 at 9:50am EST

• Since law reviews are generally student-run, and the editorial boards change every year, it is no wonder that they fail some of their postal duties.

  And, as the author points out Lexis/WL/HOL are the way in which most LRs are read now.

• "peer" review
• Posted by anon on February 2, 2009 at 11:25am EST

• While there's no way to verify this, another factor may be that the rest of the academy is catching on to the fact that law reviews are not peer-reviewed anonymously (law students do the manuscript reviews, and the authors are known to them.) Furthermore, the practice of multiple submissions exists for law journals. Both of these practices may account for much of the dismal scholarship found in these journals. I'm guessing that many libraries no longer wish to pay for non-peer-reviewed journals, and many non-legal scholars no longer wish to read "scholarship" of this nature. The emperor has no clothes, indeed.

• anon's speculation
• Posted by Larry on February 2, 2009 at 11:55am EST

• Anon, While some of your points are in the mainstream, there are a number of holes in your logic. Indeed, it comes off as a pretty standard bash of law reviews that is unsupported.

  First of all, you do not explain what the benefits of “anonymous” peer review might be. In practice, it rarely is truly anonymous. Just like law reviews, peer reviewers often look at the name and affiliation of the person first. (Or guess at it.) And, there is plenty of mischief and plagiarism that flies under the radar in peer reviewing.

  Secondly, law reviews are not just aimed at the academy. In fact, they actually serve real lawyers. (You know, the kind with real clients.) These are the folks that are looking for compilations of research or ideas to raise in legal arguments.

  Third, unlike “peer-reviewed” publications, law students engage in a more rigorous review of the cites in an article. This means that every citation is checked to see what it really says. Frequently, after an article is accepted, the author must provide the underlying source materials if they are not available electronically. Peer-reviewed journals often simply don’t have the inclination to check every citation.

  Fourth, you did not define or explain what you meant by “dismal” scholarship and how it is worse than a “peer-reviewed” journal. This would seem to be a rather subjective standard (especially in light of the different philosophies and goals of law journals). So, as an academic, I would say that you need to do better with that argument.

  Fifth, There is absolutely no indication that libraries are decreasing their subscriptions to law journals. If anything, practicing lawyers are (and there are many more actual lawyers than there are libraries.) Of course, both lawyers and libraries can access all these journals online, anyway.

• Law Journal statistics
• Posted by Sheila Ekman , Librarian at Bentley University on February 2, 2009 at 12:20pm EST

• When students/faculty consult law reviews at my university, they do it online. Without statistics about how often these journals are accessed on Westlaw, Lexis, etc., the information is meaningless.

• Missing the point
• Posted by Kenny The Kid on February 2, 2009 at 2:30pm EST

• The question is not how many people "subscribe" or "access" law reviews---it is how many actually read them. I suspect that however they get them, most lawyers simply scan the footnotes to find helpful cases to cite. No one care what law students or law professors think the law is or ought to be.

• Response to Larry
• Posted by Anon on February 4, 2009 at 7:35am EST

• Larry,
  Not sure if this topic is dead, but I'll respond.
  1. The practice of peer review, though not perfect, is the standard practice for literally every other academic discipline other than law. Clearly, there are significant benefits to it.

  2. As a former law review editor (and a Ph.D.), I'm aware of cite-checking by law reviews. Cite-checking is great for references, but second-year law students are not able to provide substantive, content-based assistance.

  3. As for dismal scholarship, you may be aware that many errors are found in legal scholarship, due to the absence of any peer review. Furthermore, legal scholarship is almost always normative, not positive, which is a recipe for bad work.

  4. Finally, do you really think that the majority of lawyers consult law reviews? This former lawyer is, shall we say, skeptical.

• Posted by reader on February 4, 2009 at 12:50pm EST

• Again, the problem with your argument is that you are simply unable to offer specifics. You can't even provide an example of "dismal" scholarship. For this reason, I think you are just suffering from the inferiority complex many in the legal profession suffer from. (Which, to me, is strange, since most lawyers I know write far more, and they must take real responsibility for their arguments.) But, again, you can't provide specifics.

  Secondly, while I agree that second-year law students don't have a large body of substantive knowledge, the legal profession is not simply a bunch of people with a high level of substantive knowledge talking to each other. Instead, the practice of law usually involves explaining relative foreign concepts to people with only a generalized knowledge of the law. This is what citation is important. So, second year law students that can verify a source of authority are in pretty much the same position as a judge hearing a case on an unfamiliar area of law.

  Your personal experience does not make your point more or less valid. You would have needed to provide specifics. You did not.

  I don't quite know what you mean by "consult" law reviews. I admit that I don't read them from cover to cover, but if there is something I have never seen before a law review can be helpful in explaining it to me, and give me a quick list of citations and/or idea for an argument to make.

  Most alarming, I think, is your assertion that the scholarship in law reviews is "dismal." As an academic, I am sure that you are aware of the dangers of such subjective statements, and the problem with not providing even a single example for what you consider to be a general proposition.

• Lawyerisms
• Posted by DFS on February 4, 2009 at 1:10pm EST

• Since our "laws" can change day-by-day, on the interpretations of "lawyers," why not anything else, if somehow alluded to by "law?"

  In this way, perhaps, "Tuesday can be hereafter alluded to as Thursday."

  Don't we just love absolutist lawyer-speak?

  Just give me a precedence, after all. Isn't that what we're taught in law-speak-school?

• response to Larry/reader
• Posted by Anon on February 4, 2009 at 3:35pm EST

• Larry/reader,
  Here's my last word:

  Your response consists only of ad hominem attacks (which I did not engage in), and the repeated assertion that I didn't provide specifics.

  1. First of all, responding to your ad hominem attack, I am a professor, not a practicing attorney (any more), so I don't possess your asserted inferiority complex.

  2. As for specifics, I could give specific examples of (what I consider to be) bad scholarship, but that is not appropriate in a forum like this. Let me just provide a general example: Law Prof 1 makes a mistake in his/her law review article, which is not caught by the student editors. Because law profs, for the most part, do not consult scholarship from other disciplines, Law Prof 2 goes to Lexis and reads Law Prof 1's article, and then repeats the mistaken assertion in the first article. And so on, and so on.

  3. As for specifics, I gave you two specific criticisms of the student-edited law journal process: that 24-year-old students cannot adequately critique (for example) Larry Tribe's work, and also that legal scholarship is normative, not positive. If you're unsure what that means, normative work is argumentative, advocacy scholarship. "I think Law X is bad, and should be changed." Positive or empirical scholarship is "Here is data showing why Law X is bad."

  Hope this has been instructive for you.

  Best,

  Anon