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

Spring 2010: Is the Window Open? (re-re-bumped)

posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger

It’s February, March, so let’s ask the regular questions:

1. Has your board turned over? If not, when will it?

2. Details please. 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? Overall, is your journal taking submissions yet; and if not, when will it start?

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

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

5. Is there anything else that authors should keep in mind as this spring season (gulp) begins?

This thread will be bumped weakly. Err, weekly.

  March 8, 2010 at 12:27 pm   Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews)   Print This Post   172 Comments

Tell me, how long, how long

posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger

So you sent out a regular article in the general submission process to mainstream law reviews this season or last (not an essay, a short symposium piece, a sidebar piece, a reply, a book review). How many pages was it? (If you sent out more than one of different lengths, you can select more than one option).

  February 23, 2010 at 2:16 am   Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews)   Print This Post   4 Comments

Author poll: Spring target dates

posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger

We’ve asked editors to give us some information about their submissions windows. I thought it might be useful to check with authors as well. If you’re planning on sending out your masterwork this spring (and aren’t we all?), what is your target date for submitting it?

  February 7, 2010 at 11:33 pm   Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews)   Print This Post   No Comments

Movies Inspired By Law Review Articles

posted by Dave Hoffman

Gerard’s post about the worst movie about constitutional law inspires me to ask the following question: has there ever been a movie inspired by a law review article?  I can think of at least one book (by a law professor) that inspired a movie (on television).  But I can’t think of an article in a student-edited journal that inspired a wide-screen release. Can you?

  January 26, 2010 at 3:30 pm   Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews), Weird   Print This Post   3 Comments

Gentlepeople, start your engines

posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger

A recent comment asked if we were going to put up an open thread on law review submission season. And here we are! (Concurring Opinions, where we listen to our readers. Except when we’re distracted with grading, or watching cute puppies playing Guitar Hero on Youtube.) So, stealing shamelessly from last year’s post:

1. Has your board turned over? If not, when will it?

2. 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? Is your journal taking submissions yet? (Please God no — I have at least two weeks of edits left on my piece.)

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

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

5. Do you (still) take cash?

And professors should note that, even if/though journals are (hopefully) not reviewing submissions right now, rightnow is the time to send your piece out to colleagues for feedback and/or star-footnote credit — if you haven’t already done so.

Related and possibly helpful: How to write your cover letter

Law Review customer service rankings

Should it become necessary, how to deal with rejections.

Best of luck, all!

  January 26, 2010 at 11:47 am   Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews)   Print This Post   3 Comments

Iowa Law Review, Volume 95, Issue 1 (November 2009)

posted by Iowa Law Review

Articles

Juvenile Justice: The Fourth Option
Christopher Slobogin & Mark R. Fondacaro

Testing Modern Trademark Law’s Theory of Harm
Mark P. McKenna

Ignorance Is Effectively Bliss: Collateral Consequences, Silence, and Misinformation in the Guilty-Plea Process
Jenny Roberts

Formalism and Pragmatism in Ruins (Mapping the Logics of Collapse)
Pierre Schlag

Notes

Making Taxes More Certain: Iowa State Legislators’ Guide to Combined Reporting
Lindsay C. McAfee

Rescuecom Corp. v. Google Inc.: A Conscious Analytical Shift
Jessica A.E. McKinney

An Iowa Immigration Raid Leads to Unprecedented Criminal Consequences: Why ICE Should Rethink the Postville Model
Cassie L. Peterson

Clearing the Air: Analyzing the Constitutionality of the Iowa Smokefree Air Act’s Gaming-Floor Exemption
Kevin D. Sherlock

  January 10, 2010 at 5:28 pm   Posted in: Law Rev (Iowa), Law Rev Contents, Law Rev Forum, Law School (Law Reviews)   Print This Post   Comments Closed

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   8 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

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