Comments on: Best of Both Worlds: Now Online and In Print

By: Danielle Citron

Danielle Citron — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 13:35:39 +0000

I bet that we hear more from WULR soon as I received the heads-up email from the Commentary editor yesterday. It is a new initiative and I am so glad that readers are interested. Yes, it will be so interesting to see if, or when, journals move their publication online. I remain a fan of print, perhaps because I love being surrounded by books and newspapers (my age is showing here). But I also appreciate online writing immensely so it strikes me as brilliant to wed the two, at least until we can get on board the cyberspace writing express in a more robust way. The market forces here are indeed a concern, as Anon astutely notes. So it is a wait and see, I suppose. And AW no worries about the typos, I didn’t notice! Thanks all, Danielle

By: Tenrou Ugetsu

Tenrou Ugetsu — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 22:14:57 +0000

I was curious about the announcement, too. I was combing through WUSL and couldn’t find anything. I suppose I’ll just have to wait…

By: A.W.

A.W. — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 18:12:12 +0000

Danielle,

For the record, my rate of typos decrease hourly. So at 9:19 a.m. the typo fairy was sprinkling her dust all over my comment. lol

Still, my apologies.

By: Anon

Anon — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 18:05:15 +0000

This doesn’t really address the fundamental problem for law journals – the print subscription market is drying up (especially among law firms) and even the main law reviews at top schools are increasingly finding themselves unable to remain financially self-sufficient without substantial endowment or other revenues (e.g., ads or the Blue Book, which are both at risk from on-line competitors too). This could go two possible ways: (1) Some top journal is going to go all electronic and then the wall will topple and all journals will follow, or (2) Law schools will increase their subsidy of journals (beyond the free rent and overhead they now provide) and increasingly exert more control over those journals, via changes to board and member selection criteria and timing, oversight on article selection, etc. Neither path seems like the end of the world and both have some advantages. The problem of speed of publication vis-a-vis blogs and other electronic media really pales in comparison to the financial difficulty already hitting many journals.

By: Danielle Citron

Danielle Citron — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:40:55 +0000

Howard, I am sure the announcement is coming soon. I received an email from the editor of new commentary publishing about it. Yes, and it will be interesting to see the academy respond to stand alone online work over time. Thanks A.W. and Howard for the comments.

By: Howard Wasserman

Howard Wasserman — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:23:42 +0000

Interesting. Do you know where the announcement is? I could not find it on the WUSL home page.

This, of course, is one journal doing, on its own, what several journals are doing as the “Legal Workshop” (http://legalworkshop.org/). The more interesting thing to me remains how we are going to treat short, original, on-line only pieces.

By: A.W.

A.W. — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 16:19:21 +0000

personally i think that the journals should increasingly just give their product away. maybe stuff it with adds like a newpaper article, and then say “you can only reproduce this with the adds” in the copyright release.

The reason why i say this is that there shouldn’t be a firewall between the general public and the legal academy. we SHOULD be sharing our thoughts and ideas, both to inform the public and maybe even get a little feedback. Alot of ideas that sound great on paper wither in the face of real world experience.

Indeed, i am sure Glenn Reynolds would be first to say a more “open-source” approach to academics generally is probablyl a good thing. That is you post it online, let not just your peers review it, but regular folks, too. you never know when a person might have a good point even if they don’t have the right “letters” after their name.

For instance, imagine if Sotomayor posted her “wise latina” comment online back when she made it. maybe someone would have read it, and actually said, “you know what? that sounds pretty racist.” and maybe she would have realized this was a problem before she repeated it 5 or 6 times.