Archive for the ‘Law School (Law Reviews)’ Category

Law Journal Marketing

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

How are academic works promoted by publishers, trade or university presses, academic book publishers and law journals? In general, trade presses do a broad funded pitch, university presses do some but more narrowly, academic book publishers make a strong push to a targeted audience and law journals do . . . pretty much nothing.

Should law journals do more? Are any doing so? Aside from promotions such as we at Concurring Opinions offer to a necessarily limited number of journals on this blog, listing recent issues, and some symposia pitches, law reviews don’t market themselves. Florida Law Review is poised to change this, and I support the leadership. Read the rest of this post »

  October 14, 2009 at 7:01 pm   Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews)   Print This Post   One Comment

The Yale Law Journal Online

posted by Yale Law Journal

The Yale Law Journal is pleased to present its new online platform, The Yale Law Journal Online (http://www.yalelawjournal.org/). YLJ Online will continue the Journal’s mission of providing accessible and substantive scholarship through the online medium. It offers original essays on timely and novel legal developments and responses to articles in the print Journal, as well as adapted lectures and recordings/podcasts of featured pieces.

When the Journal launched The Pocket Part in 2005, it was the first law review to establish an original online companion; as the Journal nears its 120th anniversary, YLJ Online represents the next step in that endeavor. The launch of YLJ Online’s original content section features an essay by Hiro N. Aragaki, addressing the Hall Street v. Mattel litigation and manifest disregard, as well as responses by selected scholars to Michael Stokes Paulsen’s The Constitutional Power To Interpret International Law (118 Yale L.J. 1762 (2009)).

In the coming weeks, YLJ Online will present a variety of essays and features on marriage, property, and corporate law, as well as a selection of pieces from the Hon. J. Harvie Wilkinson III and other participants in its inaugural Washington, D.C. conference on the Supreme Court’s certiorari process. Among the many features that YLJ Online offers are Essays (4,000-6,000 words), Commentaries (under 2,000 words), Responses, adapted lectures and solicited pieces. More information can be found on the Submissions page (http://www.yalelawjournal.org/submissions.html). All YLJ Online publications are available and fully searchable through LexisNexis and Westlaw. The Journal also provides all YLJ Online pieces in PDF/reprint format, and podcasts on its website/iTunes for selected pieces. For questions regarding YLJ Online, please contact the Journal’s Managing Online Editor, Jeff K. Lee, here.

Now available on YLJ Online:

Essay

Hiro N. Aragaki, The Mess of Manifest Disregard, 119 Yale L.J. Online 1 (2009). [HTML] [PDF]

Responses

Julian Ku, The Prospects for the Peaceful Co-Existence of Constitutional and International Law, 119 Yale L.J. Online 15 (2009). [HTML] [PDF]

Peter J. Spiro, Wishing International Law Away, 119 Yale L.J. Online 23 (2009). [HTML] [PDF]

Margaret E. McGuinness, Old W(h)ine, Old Bottles: A Response to Professor Paulsen, 119 Yale L.J. Online 31 (2009). [HTML] [PDF]

Robert Ahdieh, The Fog of Certainty, 119 Yale L.J. Online 41 (2009). [HTML] [PDF]

  October 2, 2009 at 7:28 am   Posted in: Law Rev (Yale), Law Rev Contents, Law Rev Forum, Law School (Law Reviews)   Print This Post   No Comments

Dealing with Law Review Rejections

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

As this fall’s law review submission season draws to a close, it is likely that many worthy pieces will go unselected for publication or be selected by less prestigious journals or with longer time lags than sought. Affected authors face some choices.

Fortunately, the practice allowing for concurrent submissions to student editors in recognized seasons makes the process less difficult compared to fields reliant on peer-reviewed journals, requiring exclusive submissions without identifiable seasons.

For instance, in mathematics, a new journal, Rejecta Mathematica, dedicates itself to publishing only articles previously rejected by a peer-review journal. This suggests considerable frustration with that system (along with other features Dave Hoffman recently blogged about here).

For legal scholarship, such a Rejecta Lex Rev. does not seem necessary or feasible. True, some pieces are accepted for publication without receiving a single rejection, but the vast majority attract at least one rejection, and many are rejected by dozens or scores of journals. Still, legal scholars striking out or low any season face some issues.

Read the rest of this post »

  September 10, 2009 at 2:54 pm   Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews)   Print This Post   2 Comments

Iowa Law Review, Volume 94, Issue 5 (July 2009)

posted by Iowa Law Review

CRITICAL RACE THEORY SPEAKER SERIES
CRT 20: HONORING OUR PAST, CHARTING OUR FUTURE

Introduction

  September 10, 2009 at 9:35 am   Posted in: Law Rev (Iowa), Law Rev Contents, Law Rev Forum, Law School (Law Reviews)   Print This Post   No Comments

A Dispositive Defense of Student Law Reviews

posted by Dave Hoffman

There is no way that this would happen in a student journal.  Delays?  Sure.  Bad edits?  Absolutely.  But this nonsense and collusion?  I think not.  Only non-lawyers would put up with this.

How to Publish a Scientific Comment in 1 2 3 Easy Steps

(H/T: Leiter.)

  September 5, 2009 at 7:01 pm   Posted in: Articles and Books, Law School (Law Reviews), Law School (Scholarship)   Print This Post   12 Comments

Law Review Rejection Letters and Withdraws

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

Following on my post about law review submission cover letters, this one is about law review rejection letters—and withdraws. Authors prefer receiving offers of publication to rejections. But most pieces attract at least some rejections and submissions to multiple publishers often get a high ratio of rejections to offers. Absent an offer, authors also prefer getting rejections to hearing nothing, to facilitate closure when making final publication decisions.

Unfortunately, in legal academic publishing, it is common for authors never to hear from publishers, as the thread at The Faculty Lounge suggests (and my own experience over 15 years attests). Yet while I appreciate receiving rejection letters, I think the common silence entirely understandable, given the law review publication process. In my opinion, authors seeking requisite closure should simply formally withdraw their piece from consideration once a deadline has passed.

As an example, this season, on August 8, I submitted an article to 45 journals (following standard practice in legal academics allowing for such concurrent submission). I received 3 offers (on August 18, 19 and 26), 17 rejections (trickling in from August 11 to September 2, when I accepted an offer), and did not hear from 25 journals. Read the rest of this post »

  September 2, 2009 at 4:22 pm   Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews)   Print This Post   14 Comments

Law Review Submissions Open Thread

posted by Dave Hoffman

Reading the (increasingly nervous) comments on Prawfs at the hiring thread,
you can really get a feel for how incomplete information can sometimes feel worse than ignorance.  Nevertheless, I figured that now might be a good time to get a sense of where the law reviews are in their submissions season.  If you are a law review editor, please post below your book status, i.e., full, open but working through backlog,  welcoming more submissions, etc.  If you are interested, please also post when during the week you typically make offer calls, so that those readers who are waiting will know when to feel most anxious!

For those readers who are juggling multiple offers, consider using Concurring Opinions’ Customer Service Rankings ™ as a way of making the tough choices.

  August 31, 2009 at 12:13 pm   Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews)   Print This Post   3 Comments

Iowa Law Review, Volume 94, Issue 4 (May 2009)

posted by Iowa Law Review

Articles

Saving Facebook
James Grimmelmann

Attempt by Omission
Michael T. Cahill

Strange Bedfellows: Criminal Law, Family Law, and the Legal Construction of Intimate Life
Melissa Murray

Insider Trading and the Gradual Demise of Fiduciary Principles
Donna M. Nagy

Notes

Corporate Liability for Violations of Labor Rights Under the Alien Tort Claims Act
Wesley V. Carrington

The Right and Wrong Ways to Sell A Public Forum
John C. Crees

Searching for a Solution: A Proposed Change to the Code of Iowa Chapter 808A
Morgan N. Engling

Nonprofits: Are You at Risk of Losing Your Tax-Exempt Status?
Gina M. Lavarda

  August 21, 2009 at 12:46 pm   Posted in: Law Rev (Iowa), Law Rev Contents, Law Rev Forum, Law School (Law Reviews), Uncategorized   Print This Post   No Comments

Concurring Opinions Book Reviews

posted by Daniel Solove

Sandy Levinson has a thoughtful new essay lamenting the dwindling number of book reviews of books about the law — The Vanishing Book Review in Student Edited Law Reviews and Potential Responses, 87 Tex. L. Rev. 1205 (2009).  He discusses how the Michigan Law Review used to run 30 to 40 book reviews in its book review issue but now is running only about 10 to 15. He notes that among the top 20 law reviews, in 1987-88, they published about 125 reviews; in 2007-08, they published only 42 reviews.

Brian Leiter notes, in the title of his post about Levinson’s article, that “academic law needs more fora for serious book reviews.”

Beyond law reviews, the number of book reviews in newspapers is rapidly diminishing.

This is why we’re starting a new project at Concurring Opinions — we’ll serve as a forum for book reviews.

We will accept submissions from our readers — law professors, lawyers, law students, and academics in other fields are welcome to submit reviews.

The reviews we envision would be approximately the length of a New York Times book review — somewhere between 500 to 2000 words.

We will try to accept as many reviews as we can, but we will exercise editorial discretion if we think a review isn’t appropriate for our blog.  We’re aiming for serious reviews.

If you’re interested in writing a book review for us, we recommend that you first email us with a brief description of what book you’d like to review and your background, as we don’t want you to go through the work of writing a review only for us to think it doesn’t fit with our blog.  Emailing us in advance won’t guarantee acceptance, but we would hope to give you a good indication of whether we’d be interested in your review.

We believe that there’s a need for serious yet short book reviews, ones that aren’t as long as those published in law reviews.  That’s why we’re starting this project.  We expect it to be ongoing, so if you’ve read a law-related book recently and want a forum to publish your views about it, please think about doing a review for us.

If you publish a book review here, you keep copyright in your work, so you can use it, publish it, and disseminate it later in whatever way you desire.

So please email us if you’re interested.

  August 18, 2009 at 7:21 pm   Posted in: Administrative Announcements, Articles and Books, Book Reviews, Law School (Law Reviews), Law School (Scholarship)   Print This Post   One Comment

August Submissions Window

posted by Dave Hoffman

Over at Prawfs, Carissa Hessick has a thread going on when people think that law review editors are accepting submissions.  This is useful, and Orin’s comment over there isn’t to be missed.  But how about the supply side? If you are submitting in this window, when are you planning to do so? Take the survey (which includes the option to identify yourself as an early bird, who has already submitted).

  August 4, 2009 at 2:08 pm   Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews)   Print This Post   3 Comments

Sample Law Review Submission Cover Letters

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

Following this post are four sample law review submission cover letters I have used in recent seasons.   I provide them after detecting an absence of any samples existing on the Internet and reviewing various posts and comment threads addressing the subject that leave readers conflicted about what a cover letter might accomplish. 

There is considerable Web commentary on many aspects of the law journal submission process, which Dan Solove helpfully collects here.  Few address cover letters directly, and those are humorous, sarcastic, or questions without comments.There is a  sample cover letter on page 288 of Eugene Volokh, Academic Legal Writing, but I could not find a single one on the Web.

When discussed, there are conflicting impressions and advice. Co-op guest blogger Elizabeth Nowicki urges writing “a crisp one-page cover letter” though Trevor Morrison and my GW colleague Orin Kerr, disagreed, opining they are useless.   Scott Dodson opined that, if a famous professor read and admired a piece, to say so in the cover letter, but an articles editor said that will not be believed unless the famous professor communicates that directly.   (Some other conflicting views appear in this thread addressing more general issues.)

What should a cover letter say? All the wrangling aside, some consensus appears as follows:

Basics. Obviously, submissions must indicate author’s name and contact information (mailing address, phone, email) and article title. Unless submitted in an electronic format that transmits this information, the cover letter is the place.

Word Count. Many journals request stating the piece’s word count, including footnotes. In addition, many journals since 2005 have express word count limits or preferences, and request cover letter explanations for approaching or exceeding the guidance.

Brevity. Keep it short, usually a single page of three paragraphs, never more than two, and then only if justified by background research and context otherwise not evident from the piece.

Main Point. State the piece’s thesis, explain its uniqueness and importance.

Prior Work. Reference your prior works, when relevant, not necessarily journal prestige, although not holding this back when relevant. (Those without prior publications may need to explain a bit more why they are pursuing scholarship, perhaps even referencing relevant credentials.)

You. Mention brief biographical data only if relevant to the piece, such as your role in the relevant discourse (or the foregoing caveat for new scholars).

Style. The cover letter should be thoughtful and sober.  You can try to entertain, but beware that attempted humor can backfire. Above all, avoid gimmicks, including strong sales pitches, exaggerated statements of importance or things unrelated to the piece. Read the rest of this post »

  August 4, 2009 at 9:07 am   Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews), Law School (Scholarship)   Print This Post   7 Comments

Sidebar publishes response to Judging the Voting Rights Act

posted by Columbia Law Review

Columbia Law Review’s Sidebar is pleased to announce the publication of a response to Judging the Voting Rights Act by Adam B. Cox and Thomas J. Miles.

Professors Cox and Miles’ study found that judicial ideology and race are closely related to findings of liability in voting rights cases. In their response Professors Staudt and VanderWeele argue that, because Cox and Miles failed to investigate the possibility of dependencies between the variables they were studying, their results may be biased. Staudt and VanderWeele develop an alternative approach for exploring the effects of judicial attributes on voting using causal directed acyclic graphs. This methodology can help empirical researchers investigate the relationships between variables in order to posit statistical models with appropriate controls and to identify true cause and effect relationships when they exist. While this methodology has become popular in a number of disciplines—including statistics, biostatistics, epidemiology, and computer science—and is widely believed to be a valuable tool for empirical research, it has yet to appear in the empirical law literature. Staudt and VanderWeele offer a brief introduction of the method in their response in order to initiate discussion as to its worth in empirical legal studies.

  June 3, 2009 at 8:27 am   Posted in: Law Rev (Columbia), Law Rev Contents, Law Rev Forum, Law School (Law Reviews)   Print This Post   No Comments

Iowa Law Review, Volume 94, Issue 3 (March 2009)

posted by Iowa Law Review

Articles

Cause for Concern: Causation and Federal Securities Fraud
Jill E. Fisch

Twombly, Pleading Rules, and the Regulation of Court Access
Robert G. Bone

Values and Value Creation in Public–Private Transactions
Nestor M. Davidson

Green Is Good: Sustainability, Profitability, and a New Paradigm for Corporate Governance
Judd F. Sneirson

Notes

A Newsworthiness Privilege for Republished Defamation of Public Figures
Matthew J. Donnelly

The NLRB’s Oil Capitol and Toering Decisions and Their Effects on Unionization and American Labor Law
Michael J. Hilkin

Stuck in a Bind: Can the Arbitration Fairness Act Solve the Problems of Mandatory Binding Arbitration in the Consumer Context?
Joshua T. Mandelbaum

Extending Refugee Definitions to Cover Environmentally Displaced Persons Displaces Necessary Protection
Kara K. Moberg

  May 15, 2009 at 3:34 pm   Posted in: Law Rev (Iowa), Law Rev Contents, Law Rev Forum, Law School (Law Reviews)   Print This Post   No Comments

The Legal Workshop

posted by Daniel Solove

A group of law reviews have created a new website called The Legal Workshop. The law reviews include Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, NYU, Northwestern, Stanford, and the University of Chicago. According to the press release:

The Legal Workshop features short, plain-English articles about legal issues and ideas, written by an author whose related, full-length work of scholarship is forthcoming in one of the participating law reviews. But The Legal Workshop does not house a collection of abstracts. Instead, it offers an engaging alternative to traditional academic articles that run 30,000 words with footnotes, enabling scholars to present their well-formulated opinions and their research to a wider audience. In addition to making legal ideas understandable, The Legal Workshop seeks to house the best of legal scholarship in one place—making it easier for readers to find the best writing about all areas of law.

Over at Legal Theory Blog, Larry Solum offers some thoughtful reactions:

The first innovation of “The Legal Workshop” is that it transforms long-articles into short-form online pieces. It seems likely that the short-form versions will reach a wider readership. Bravo! I hope this succeeds!

Second, I am a bit skeptical of the ambitious claims in the press release about reaching “the general public.” . . . . This prose is not aimed at the general public and will be incomprehensible to general readers. (This is not intended as a criticism of the writing, which does an exemplary job of reaching the general audience of legal academics.)

UPDATE: Doh! I didn’t realize that Nate already beat me to the punch and wrote about The Legal Workshop here.

  April 22, 2009 at 12:15 pm   Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews)   Print This Post   No Comments

Final Ranking]">The Best and Worst Law Reviews, Based on their Customer Service [Final Ranking]

posted by Dave Hoffman

Brian Leiter has been playing with the Condorcet Internet Voting Service to measure law school rank and law review rank by prestige. As Brian notes, there is a striking correlation between USNWR rankings and those for his polls of law schools and law reviews. (The latter, at least, isn’t surprising.)

Let’s try something different. As the comments to this post suggest, authors have some odd experiences when dealing with law review editors (both peer and students). Some journals are very professional in their dealings, others never get back to you. Some journals are bluebook fiends, requiring citation of obvious points. Others barely touch the editing pen.

I’ve created a poll which asks you to rank law reviews by their relative quality in back-of-the-office operations: do they do a good job communicating with prospective authors; are they good, value-adding, editors; do they create useful online fora to discuss articles post-publication; do they publish on time, etc. While it’s probably the case that customer service isn’t something that authors care much about when choosing between journals of very distinct prestige ranks, it ought to matter in close cases.

Go ahead, take the poll. Leave comments about particularly good or bad law review customer experiences below.

[For the final results, click on through to the next page.]

Read the rest of this post »

  Final Ranking]"> March 25, 2009 at 6:26 pm   Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews)   Print This Post   17 Comments

Law Reviews and Institutional Knowledge

posted by Deven Desai

Dave’s post and the comments about law reviews and customer service reminds me of a little something I picked up working with folks from the non-profit world. If you run something, don’t make it about you. Document what works and what doesn’t. Preserve institutional knowledge. Talk to the incoming folks about what you learned too. The new people will want to try new things, and they should. Nonetheless, the more a review/journal finds best practices and shares them with the incoming editors, the better it can mitigate the problems the high-turnover rate inherent in the system can cause. So if you ran a symposium and found out that one should plan five months or more in advance, need to book food/alcohol service in a special way, or there is some other quirk of bureaucracy to overcome, write that information down. Create a walk through of every aspect of taking an article in for review and finally publishing it. Analyze the way editors are trained.

You get the idea. The more you can capture and share the way your review works, the more the next group can build on what you accomplished rather than re-inventing the wheel. Last however one creates these documents (wikis, word files, etc.) be sure to save iterations. Knowledge can be lost while moving from version 1 to 2 or 3 or 4.

  March 15, 2009 at 1:18 am   Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews)   Print This Post   No Comments

Columbia Law Review, Volume 109 Issue 2 (March 2009)

posted by Columbia Law Review

Columbia Law Review, Volume 109 Issue 2 (March 2009)

Article

Civil Liability and Mandatory Disclosure

Merritt B. Fox

Notes

Policing the Fourth Amendment: The Constitutionality of Warrantless Investigatory Stops for Past Misdemeanors

Sameer Bajaj

The Blank Page Before You: Should the Preemption Doctrine Apply to Unwritten Practices?

Chang Derek Liu

Essay

A Bargaining Power Theory of Default Rules

Omri Ben-Shahar

  March 10, 2009 at 3:01 pm   Posted in: Law Rev (Columbia), Law Rev Contents, Law School (Law Reviews)   Print This Post   No Comments

Law Review Submissions: March “Window” and War Stories

posted by Dave Hoffman

It’s my strong sense that most law reviews are very much in gear at the moment, and that some have even finished their Spring season. (Based in part on this, and part on personal experience.) I figured I’d create a thread for journals that just started reading and are hoping for submissions, or even those that haven’t opened yet. Tell us all about it! Also, based on some inquiries, is anyone particularly looking for book reviews or essays to fill an odd cranny here or there?

Also, feel free to use the thread as a place to write about attempts to reject rejections, wheedle acceptances, or otherwise share in the madness that is the 2009 law review tournament. ™

  March 8, 2009 at 9:50 pm   Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews)   Print This Post   13 Comments

Is the Window Open? February Law Review Submission Season Notice Board

posted by Dave Hoffman

[Bumped x2.]

A few weeks back, Matt Bodie put up a thread on the winter law review submission season at Prawfs. It didn’t get too many responses, suggesting to me that the season hadn’t yet arrived. Time having passed, I’m putting this post up to inquire of our student law review readers:

1. Has your board turned over?

2. If not, when will it?

3. Do you want new articles on the day the new board moves in, or would you prefer to get used to the new digs first?

4. If you have already turned over, are you planning any theme issues that folks ought to consider submitting specialized pieces for?

5. What format do you want pieces in (especially if you are changing your previous policies).

6. Do you (still) take cash?

I will bump this thread weekly.

  February 23, 2009 at 10:52 pm   Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews)   Print This Post   20 Comments

Columbia Law Review, Volume 109 Issue 1 (January 2009)

posted by Columbia Law Review

Columbia Law Review, Volume 109 Issue 1 (January 2009)

Article

The Federal Common Law of Nations

Anthony J. Bellia Jr. & Bradford R. Clark

Notes

Discerning Discrimination in State Treatment of American Indians Going Beyond Reservation Boundaries

Shira Kieval

More Bitter Than Sweet: A Procedural Due Process Critique of Certification Periods

Amy McCamphill

Essay

The Subjective Experience of Punishment

Adam J. Kolber

  January 9, 2009 at 1:56 pm   Posted in: Law Rev (Columbia), Law Rev Contents, Law School (Law Reviews)   Print This Post   No Comments

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