Blogging Matters: YLJ Clarifies Empirical Submission Policy

In light of this post, the Yale Law Journal has clarified its submission requirements for empirical pieces. The new rule will read:

4. Data. We strongly recommend submitting .do and .dat files with any empirical submissions, and we may request this data before deciding whether to extend an offer of publication. Importantly, we can consider the piece more quickly if the files are provided at the time of submission.

This is much clearer, and makes complete sense. Anthony Vitarelli, incoming EIC of the Journal, further reports that they have in the past "asked to review data sets and will occasionally continue to do so when considering empirical pieces."

I've got to say that the reactions of the California Law Review and now the YLJ reflect well on the student editors that run them. I seriously doubt that the peer-reviewed, hidebound, journals that rule other disciplines would be so quick to respond to criticisms from outsiders. Also, it is good that they are looking at the data before extending offers, and taking seriously their gatekeeping role. (Except to the extent that they keep my pieces out of the promised land.)

Posted by Dave Hoffman at 11:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Success: California Law Review Drops Foolish Rules

Several weeks ago, I blogged about rules promulgated by the California Law Review that appeared to discourage empirical submissions. Michael Heise, at the ELS blog, then added to the chorus.

For fun, I checked the website of the CLR today, and found that the offending rules (#4, no images or graphics; and #5, only five charts/graphs/tables allowed) were gone. Way to go, anonymous California Law Review student editors!

Next target: the Yale Law Journal's incomprehensible policy on replication, which, as Katie Porter pointed out, seems to require authors to send YLJ a copy of STATA/SPSS with their submission. Query: has anyone actually complied with this rule? If so, did you pay for an extra program license?

Posted by Dave Hoffman at 03:42 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Columbia Law Review, Volume 108 Issue 2 (March 2008)

Columbia Law Review, Volume 108 Issue 2 (March 2008)

Articles
The Irony of Judicial Elections
David E. Pozen

Taking Care of Treaties
Edward T. Swaine

Notes
Conditional Preemption, Commandeering, and the Values of Cooperative Federalism: An Analysis of Section 216 of EPAct

A Not Intractable Problem: Reasonable Certainty, Tractebel, and the Problem of Damages for Anticipatory Breach of a Long Term Contract in a Thin Market

Essay
Standing and the Precautionary Principle
Jonathan Remy Nash

Posted by Columbia Law Review at 11:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Law Journals' Policies On Empirical Articles

Browsing the website of the California Law Review, I came across two rules that pose something of a problem for folks writing empirical articles:

4) CLR does not allow the use of images or graphics in our published articles.

5) CLR will publish up to five author-created charts, graphs, and/or tables. All charts, graphs, and tables must be included in the manuscript by the end of the primary editing stage.

Both of these rules may get the in the way of coherent presentation of data, and I'm not sure what motivated the law review to promulgate them. (I imagine that no one actually follows these rules, or that they are negotiable, but why have them in the first place?)

This prompts a question: have people doing empirical work had particularly good or bad experiences working with student-edited journals? From what I've observed, editors stay far away from mucking with data or questioning regression methods, and journals' graphics departments aren't yet STATA-friendly. Is that about the norm?

[Update: Michael Heise reacts here and observes that "CLR's submission requirements invite some level of risk to that Review."]

Posted by Dave Hoffman at 12:18 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

PENNumbra's featured works are now available at the NEW AND IMPROVED www.pennumbra.com.

The Pentagon’s recent decision to try six Guantanamo detainees for capital crimes such as “terrorism and support of terrorism” made national headlines. William Glaberson, “U.S. Charges 6 With Key Roles in 9/11 Attacks,” N.Y. Times, Feb. 11, 2008, at A1. In this latest PENNumbra Debate, Professors Amos N. Guiora, of the University of Utah, and John T. Parry, of Lewis & Clark Law School, attempt to settle the question of what sort of forum is most appropriate to try the thousands of individuals in U.S. custody who are suspected of terrorism (Light at the End of the Pipeline?: Choosing a Forum for Suspected Terrorists).

Professor Guiora considers three forum options: treaty-based international terror courts, traditional Article III courts, and a “hybrid” option he calls domestic terror courts. Ultimately, Professor Guiora argues in favor of domestic terror courts, which he describes as being able to “balance[] the legitimate rights of the individual with the equally legitimate national security rights of the state.” He considers this option to be the most practical and expedient policy solution, necessitated by an untenable tension between the understanding “that some of the detainees present a genuine threat to American national security,” and an awareness “that indefinite detention violates constitutional principles and fundamental concepts of morality.”

Professor Parry agrees that current U.S. policy toward detainees has been “misguided,” but does not believe that innovations of the sort proposed by Professor Guiora are necessary. Rather, he suggests “that policymakers should choose Article III courts rather than hybrid courts for trials of suspected terrorists, with military courts as a fall-back option.” Professor Parry points to research that shows that “the federal government is often able to prosecute suspected terrorists in federal court,” and therefore considers alternative proposals to Article III courts to be “solution[s] in search of a problem.” Professor Parry realizes that “trial in federal court will not be possible for every suspected terrorist,” and concludes that, “[f]or people who pose a risk but whose conduct may not violate federal criminal law, prolonged preventive detention is the best choice.”

As always, please click on the PENNumbra link to read previous Responses and Debates, or to check out pdfs of the Penn Law Review's print edition articles.

Posted by University of Pennsylvania Law Review at 10:21 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Making an Impact as a Law Journal Editor (Spring 2008)

(I'm reprising an edited and updated version of my April 2006 post on how incoming board members at law journals can make an immediate impact on their organization. The original post had a good comment thread, which hopefully we can reprise here.)

How can student editors efficiently improve their journal’s reputation? The problem is a hard one. Al Brophy has shown that standard measures of journal rank (see here and click on 2007 Rank, JNLS tab) correlate with overall school US News ranking, itself a sticky number. However, the Washington and Lee ranking methodology offers other options, including the increasingly popular IMPACT and IMMEDIACY variables. In this entry, I'm going to explore some ways that journal editors might be able to increase their scores on these factors, and (in a virtuous cycle) the number and quality of submissions. In no way should this post be seen as an endorsement of the current system, though I'm significantly more pro-student-edited-journals than many of my colleagues. This is more of a user's guide to the devil we've got.

1. Convince High-Profile Authors to Write Articles: High-profile authors are, by definition, cited more often. See Balkin & Levinson, How to Win Cites and Influence People. It is also conceivable that HP folks produce better work than LP folks (to know for sure, we'd have to have an agreement about what better work is. And, as Frank Pasquale has pointed out, we don't). But, for believers in the HP strategy, there are a few variants:

• Symposium Issues
• Invite authors to submit book reviews or essays on substantive topics
• Invite tributes to famous judges

Of these methods, the best is the second. Symposiums may not always get authors' full attention, in part because of collective action/collective benefit problems. Tributes, I think, are unlikely to be cited heavily, if at all. But even the second method has problems, as discussed below.

2. Turn Straw Into Gold: This is an editing strategy. As Barack Obama noted when he took the reins at the HLR, making articles easier to read might make them more likely to be read. How? First, as many have noted, editors should back away from footnote-fetishization. Footnote-laden sentences are hard to read and easy to ignore.[*] Second, editors should push authors to select titles that clearly explain the article's purposes, and should help authors to write succinct abstracts for every piece. (Notably, I think there is a trend toward succinct law review titles too, with Brian Tamanaha now taking the cake. If anyone cares, I'm flag-planting on the titles "Contracts," "The Corporation," "Fantastic Law," and "Behavior.")

3. Promotion: Some journals have begun to push authors to put up articles onto SSRN. There is no reason for the journals' marketing to stop there. Journals should absorb more of the cost of reprints for authors who either are not affiliated with a law school, or whose law school does not pay for reprints. Journals also should aggressively promote (via email or fliers) journal contents to practitioners and judges, who may be unlikely to be reached by academic reprint mailings. Partnership with blogs is also a good method - PENNumbra, for example, has gotten some nice attention for its work through its postings here.

4. Gaming the System?: Reading W&L's ranking methodology page, some obvious strategies are currently available. Impact factor is currently dependent on citations per article, and is "biased against journals that publish a larger number of shorter articles, such as book reviews." Thus, Strategy 1(b) above is in tension with increasing impact scores in the short run. It is better (at least for IMPACT purposes) to have one article cited 20 times than two articles cited 15 times apiece. IMPACT rankings can be increased if a journal publishes a long article that is cited by multiple sources - the model I have in mind is Georgetown's annual criminal law summary, or a state counterpart. Because courts cite such summaries more often than they do "theory" articles, the IMMEDIACY factor would also likely be affected. As the W&L methodology makes clear, neither factor is particularly robust - they can be moved with one or two strong articles (i.e., they do not appear to control for outliers).

Thus, a strategy might be to recruit students to collaborate to write longer, doctrinal, judge and practitioner friendly, pieces. Journals often do this on an annual basis, but why not have summaries of various areas of law in every issue? Or to be more provocative, journals might consider replacing the case note and comment system entirely with a system of mini-treatises. Such a change would have the secondary effect of making law reviews more relevant to law practice. And a tertiary effect of rescuing rankings from charges that they are always pernicious.

The comment thread is open for other ideas.

Notes:

* But so tempting.

Posted by Dave Hoffman at 03:19 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Law Review Article Submission Resources (Spring 2008)

I'm reprising my post of law review submission resources that I last posted in fall 2007. I assume that most of the information hasn't changed since then, but I haven't had a chance to recheck it.

So I thought I'd tap the powers of the blogosphere -- please let me know if any of the information below has changed. Also, a request to law review editors: Please put in the comments when you plan to begin reviewing articles for the spring submission season.

Article Submission Length Restrictions

Emory Law School's Library has a very useful chart of article length restrictions at the top 35 law reviews.

The general consensus is that many top law reviews have an article length limit of 35,000 words and a preference for no more than 25,000 words. Virginia Law Review has the strictest policy, with a limit (not just a preference) of under 25,000 words. All the rest have either no upper limit or a 35,000 to 40,000 word limit. As for preferences, the range is between 25,000 to 35,000 words, with most at 25,000.

Law Review Contact Information

1. Emory Law School's Library maintains contact information, including email addresses, for the top 25 law reviews.

2. JURIST has links to countless law review websites.

3. LexisNexis Directory of Law Reviews

Law Review Rankings

Washington & Lee's Law Library has a comprehensive ranking of law reviews based on citation counts.

Electronic Submissions

1. ExpressO provides for electronic submission to over 550 law reviews. However, a number of the top 25 law reviews still require either paper submissions or electronic submissions via their own website. For those law reviews not allowing an ExpressO electronic submission, ExpressO will print out the article and send it to these journals in hard copy. It costs extra for these submissions.

Chart of Law Review Submission Policies and Webpages

After the break is a chart of the submission policies and submission pages for several top law reviews.

LAW REVIEW	EXPRESSO	ONLINE SUBMISSION PAGE	WORD LENGTH
California	Electronic (Expresso Preferred)	No	35,000 or less
Chicago	Electronic (Expresso Preferred)	No	None
Columbia	Hard Copy	Yes	32,000 or less preferred; not more than 37,000
Cornell	Electronic (Expresso Preferred)	No	30,000 or less preferred
Duke	Electronic (Expresso Preferred)	No	35,000 or less
Fordham	Electronic (Expresso Preferred)	No	None
Georgetown	Electronic (No Preference)	Yes	35,000 or less
George Washington	Electronic	No	None
Harvard	Hard Copy	Yes	25,000 or less preferred; not more than 35,000
Illinois	Electronic (Expresso Preferred)	No	None
Indiana	Electronic	No	None
Iowa	Electronic (Expresso Preferred)	No	None
Michigan	Hard Copy	Yes	25,000 or less strongly preferred
Minnesota	Electronic (Expresso Preferred)	No	None
NYU	Electronic (Expresso Preferred)	No	35,000 or less preferred
North Carolina	Electronic (Expresso Preferred)	No	25,000 or less preferred; not more than 40,000
Northwestern	Electronic (Expresso Preferred)	No	35,000 or less
Notre Dame	Electronic	No	None
University of Pennsylvania	Hard Copy (prefers its own site)	Yes	35,000 or less
Southern California	Electronic (Expresso Preferred)	No	None
Stanford	Electronic (prefers its own site)	Yes	30,000 or less
Texas	Electronic (Expresso Preferred)	No	None
UCLA	Electronic (Expresso Preferred)	No	35,000 or less
Vanderbilt	Hard Copy	No	None
Virginia	Electronic	No	25,000 or less strongly preferred; not more than 30,000
William & Mary	Hard Copy	No	None
Wisconsin	Electronic (Expresso Preferred)	No	37,000 or less
Yale	Electronic (prefers its own site)	Yes	30,000 or less preferred; 35,000+ strongly discouraged

Posted by Daniel J. Solove at 03:47 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Law Review Symposia List 2008

The Berkeley Electronic Press has compiled a list of law review symposia for 2008. The list is organized around subject area and is quite useful. Over 50 law schools are represented on this list.

Posted by Daniel J. Solove at 10:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Columbia Law Review, Volume 108 Issue 1 (January 2008)

Columbia Law Review, Volume 108 Issue 1 (January 2008)

Articles
Judging the Voting Rights Act
Adam B. Cox & Thomas J. Miles

Judging Innocence
Brandon L. Garrett

Notes
Giving Precise Content to the Eighth Amendment: An Assessment of the Remedial Provisions of the Prison Litigation Reform Act

Why the National Popular Vote Plan Is the Wrong Way to Abolish the Electoral College

Essay
Deconstructing Equity: Public Ownership, Agency Costs, and Complete Capital Markets
Ronald J. Gilson & Charles K. Whitehead

Posted by Columbia Law Review at 03:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Columbia Law Review, Volume 107 Issue 8 (December 2007)

Columbia Law Review, Volume 107 Issue 8 (December 2007)

Posted by Columbia Law Review at 02:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Columbia Law Review, Volume 107 Issue 8 (December 2007)

Columbia Law Review, Volume 107 Issue 8 (December 2007)

Articles
Procedures As Politics in Administrative Law
Lisa Schultz Bressman

Mandating Access to Telecom and the Internet: The Hidden Side of Trinko
Daniel F. Spulber & Christopher S. Yoo

Notes
Opportunistic Informal Bankruptcy: How BAPCPA May Fail to Make Wealthy Debtors Pay Up

The Line Between Liberty and Union: Exercising Personal Jurisdiction over Officials from Other States

Essay
The Paradoxes of Cultural Property
Naomi Mezey

Posted by Columbia Law Review at 02:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Irrelevant, the Revolutionary, and the Well-Cited

Concurring Opinions co-proprietor Frank Pasquale has an interesting reflection on a recent critique of the explosion of law review articles and the possibly autopoietic self-referentiality of citations (it seems to me it is a fair interpretation of the largely irrefutable evidence Paul Caron has gathered on the "long-tail" of legal scholarship.) I think Frank is onto something, particularly in this Age of Rankings: we are once again seeming to look for the silver bullet indicator of something that is probably irreducibly complex. What is important or an advancement is not going to be determined conclusively by the number of times the article gets cited (the popular equivalent of which leads to something like the conclusion that Ann Coulter is the most important mind at work today, and Britney Spears the most significant cultural icon) nor is it necessarily going to determined by the high priests of whatever "law and..." sub-discipline is at issue, but both have some bearing.

That complexity is reflected in the observation that there's a fine line between the irrelevant and the revolutionary. I'm reading Walter Isaacson's biography of Einstein (with a grain of salt now because Isaacson so badly messed up Kant's view of analytic and synthetic knowledge and the relationship of either to the a priori), but he observes that Einstein probably benefited from the fact that he did his work in the patent office, where he wouldn't have been co-opted by the received views of the time. Although, again, there's a chicken and egg issue - Einstein's basic iconoclasm and impudence no doubt contributed to the fact that he couldn't get a job as a professor!

Posted by Jeff Lipshaw at 09:54 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Columbia Law Review, Volume 107 Issue 7 (November 2007)

Columbia Law Review, Volume 107 Issue 7 (November 2007)

Article
Suspension and the Extrajudicial Constitution
Trevor W. Morrison

NOTES
The Forty Year “First Step”: The Fair Housing Act As an Incomplete Tool for Suburban Integration

The Case of the Missing Case: Examining the Civil Right of Action for Human Trafficking Victims

ESSAY
Eminent Domain, Inc.
Amnon Lehavi
Amir N. Licht

Posted by Columbia Law Review at 02:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

It wouldn't have happened at a law review...

While I am more than willing to acknowledge (and complain at great lengths) about the faults of student-edited law reviews, I am not as dogmatic on the subject as some. I actually think that law reviews often do a better job than they are given credit for by academics who are convinced that their brilliant and ground breaking work is just not appreciated by 3Ls. Also, the quality of the copy editing in law reviews tends to be very high. For example, the editors' preface in the most recent issue of the Journal of Legal Education (which is not, as far as I know, run by students) contains this boo-boo:

Educators Neil Hamilton and Lisa Brabbit [AS: check spelling of author's name] focus our attention on the importance of mentoring and career "role-modeling" as part of the educational process to instill notions of "professionalism" in our law students and young lawyers.

One suspects that this sort of mistake is less common when hyper anal third-year law students are at the helm.

Posted by Nate Oman at 03:57 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

Law Review Placement Status Report

I have heard from colleagues about recent publication offers from some of the top law reviews, but I'm wondering what the process has been like for law review editors this time around. A few weeks ago, Dan Solove reported that there were more submissions earlier this cycle than there had been in previous years, and that many journals were facing substantial backlogs. Is this still the case? Have most journals filled their upcoming volumes, or are there still slots available? Have recent offers mostly been extended after expedited review, or from the long slog through the pile of fall submissions? I'd be interested to hear from the editors; feel free to leave comments or to email me directly.

Posted by Peter Smith at 02:09 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Is the Fall Law Review Submission Window Moving Earlier?

An editor at a top law review emailed me with the following:

From our records, it looks like the submission season started about two weeks earlier this year than last year. We keep a daily log of submission numbers, and the uptic this year was on July 24, with the real flood starting on August 2. Last year the uptic was August 1, and it built up gradually until the big flood starting August 15.

The earlier dates have created a backlog for us. We were not expecting things to move earlier, and most of our committee members have been on vacation since early August and are not returning until school starts. We have about twice as many articles awaiting review now than we did in February when we began our review process. I have received numerous expedite requests that the committee simply cannot handle.

I don't know if other schools were expecting the earlier submission dates, but I'd be interested to find out whether they were and how they have dealt with it. And I think the early movers are doing quite a disservice to themselves (by being unable to expedite) and to others (who will have to wait until we clear the backlog before their articles are read). If you had asked me over the summer, I would have strongly encouraged authors to wait until at least the week before Labor Day to submit their articles. Now, I'm hoping more of them wait until mid-September.

I've generally thought that the fall window began around the third week of August, at the time when law students were returning to school. Is it moving earlier? From the editor's email, it appears that more professors are submitting in the beginning of August and more law reviews are reviewing and extending offers in early August.

Posted by Daniel J. Solove at 10:41 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

A Sample Law Review Submission Policy

I recently came across the following law review submission policy and was astounded by its candor. Check it out for the real truth behind law review article submissions.

Submissions

We thank you for your interest in submitting to Pulp Law Review. Please read our submissions guidelines carefully.

Pulp Law Review accepts electronic submissions via our online submission system. We require you to put all your documents (CV, cover letter, article) into one file so that it messes up your margins and pagination and makes your life difficult. We do this to ensure that only those who really want to spend the time and aggravation submit to us.

In order to increase your cost and delay your submission, Pulp Law Review will only accept hard copy submissions from ExpressO. We do this because we are a very highly ranked law review, so we can get away with it.

Selection

The Pulp Law Review desires to publish articles of outstanding quality that make meaningful and original contributions to legal scholarship. Because we would not be able to fill our six issues under this standard, we have decided to also accept articles that rehash existing scholarship but that do so with clever framing, articles that sound really profound, or articles that discuss trendy theories (extra points if your article gets these theories right, but we're unlikely to know if it does).

In considering your article, we use an objective point system for assessing scholarly quality. Articles receiving over 100 points are generally accepted. Here is how it works:

1. Are you from a highly-ranked law school? If yes, add 20.

2. Have you published in highly-ranked law reviews? If yes, add 30.

3. Is your name Cass Sunstein? If yes, accept immediately.

4. Does your article have a nifty title? If yes, add 10.

5. Is the introduction good? If yes, add 40.

6. Do the footnotes need a lot of editing? If yes, subtract 50.

7. Does your article have more than 6 parts? If yes, subtract 10.

8. Do you thank a bunch of big shots in your introductory footnote? If yes, add 10.

9. Is one of our professors personally hand-carrying your article to us along with free coffee and donuts? If yes, add 20.

10. Are you submission #457? If yes, then you're our lucky lottery winner and your article is accepted on the spot.

Book Reviews

Pulp Law Review welcomes book review submissions. A book review is basically the same as an article; however, it differs in that it that spends a few sentences discussing a book before launching into the author's thesis.

Submission Length

We firmly believe that the ideal length of a law review article is 0 words. However, we will accept articles of greater length under exceptional circumstances. Under no circumstances will we accept an article in excess of 35,000 words.*

* Except if you're on our list of big shot authors.

Notification of Selection or Rejection

If we select your article, we will notify you promptly and give you an insanely short window of time in which to accept our offer. You can certainly try to have other journals engage in an expedited review, but we've designed our window so that hardly any will be able to review your piece in time.

If we do not select your article, we often will not bother to inform you. After all, you're a loser, and we have no reason to show you any respect whatsoever. You've already wasted enough of our time.

If you call to check on the status of your article or to request an expedited review, we will only answer our phones during one randomly assigned hour each day. If you cannot reach a person, please leave a message on our voicemail, which we promptly delete without listening.

During some years, we might send you a brief letter or email when we reject your article. Here is the text of our letter and a translation:

TEXT OF LETTER	TRANSLATION
Thank you for the submission of your article.	We are not really thankful at all. You completely wasted our time.
After careful review, we have decided that we are unable to publish your article.	You lost us at at page 3. We wasted 45 seconds of our precious time on your article as well as the time it took to dump it in the recycle can.
We receive many submissions a year, and can only publish a few articles per year.	We do in fact receive many submissions -- far too many -- but only a few are decent. Yours wasn't one of them.
Because of space limitations, we are unable to publish many excellent articles such as yours.	We don't want your crappy work even for our law review's online companion.
We hope that you continue to submit your work to us in the future.	Yeah, right. If you believe this, you really are a fool.

Copyright

If we accept your article, we will take copyright in it. In return for your relinquishing your copyright to us, we will pay you $0. We will then make revenue off your article by licensing it to Westlaw and Lexis, and sometimes by charging fees for excerpts. We will gladly share none of this with you.

Editing

We like to think of our editing as akin to putting lipstick on a pig. We often will not meddle much with the substance of your article, as what really matters most is that the footnotes are meticulously accurate.

Sometimes, however, we enjoy rewriting an article to change the style and substance of what you are saying. We get very frustrated when authors complain about our rewriting their articles. We want to publish articles that say what we want to say, and most authors make the mistake of interfering with this process.

We will often ask you to supply pin cites and parentheticals, as well as copies of sources that should readily be available in our library. It is important to realize that we do not Bluebook for the reader or for you, but for its own inherent goodness.

We will also ask you to supply citations for every sentence, including citations for your own original thoughts as well as for obvious propositions that everybody knows. Our rule is that nothing can be said without a citation to it being said somewhere else. It does not matter if the source being cited to merely states the proposition as an ipse dixit -- as long as there is something out there that states the proposition (including your own bald statements in earlier work), this is sufficiently authoritative.

Posted by Daniel J. Solove at 12:02 AM | Comments (18) | TrackBack

Law Review Article Submissions Resources (Fall 2007)

The fall law review submission window opens in mid-to-late August, so I thought I'd reprise an earlier post with some useful resources for submitting articles.

Article Submission Length Restrictions

Emory Law School's Library has a very useful chart of article length restrictions at the top 35 law reviews.

The general consensus is that many top law reviews have an article length limit of 35,000 words and a preference for no more than 25,000 words. Virginia Law Review has the strictest policy, with a limit (not just a preference) of under 25,000 words. All the rest have either no upper limit or a 35,000 to 40,000 word limit. As for preferences, the range is between 25,000 to 35,000 words, with most at 25,000.

Law Review Contact Information

1. Emory Law School's Library maintains contact information, including email addresses, for the top 25 law reviews.

2. JURIST has links to countless law review websites.

3. LexisNexis Directory of Law Reviews

Law Review Rankings

Washington & Lee's Law Library has a comprehensive ranking of law reviews based on citation counts.

Electronic Submissions

1. ExpressO provides for electronic submission to over 550 law reviews. However, a number of the top 25 law reviews still require either paper submissions or electronic submissions via their own website. For those law reviews not allowing an ExpressO electronic submission, ExpressO will print out the article and send it to these journals in hard copy. It costs extra for these submissions.

Chart of Law Review Submission Policies and Webpages

After the break is a chart of the submission policies and submission pages for several top law reviews.

LAW REVIEW	EXPRESSO	ONLINE SUBMISSION PAGE	WORD LENGTH
California	Hard Copy	No	35,000 or less
Chicago	Electronic (Expresso Preferred)	No	None
Columbia	Hard Copy	Yes	32,000 or less preferred; not more than 37,000
Cornell	Electronic (Expresso Preferred)	No	30,000 or less preferred
Duke	Electronic (Expresso Preferred)	No	35,000 or less
Fordham	Electronic (Expresso Preferred)	No	None
Georgetown	Electronic (No Preference)	Yes	35,000 or less
George Washington	Electronic	No	None
Harvard	Hard Copy	Yes	25,000 or less preferred; not more than 35,000
Illinois	Electronic (Expresso Preferred)	No	None
Indiana	Electronic	No	None
Iowa	Electronic (Expresso Preferred)	No	None
Michigan	Hard Copy	Yes	25,000 or less strongly preferred
Minnesota	Electronic	No	None
NYU	Electronic (Expresso Preferred)	No	35,000 or less preferred
North Carolina	Electronic	No	25,000 or less preferred; not more than 40,000
Northwestern	Electronic (Expresso Preferred)	No	35,000 or less
Notre Dame	Electronic	No	None
University of Pennsylvania	Hard Copy (prefers its own site)	Yes	35,000 or less
Southern California	Electronic (Expresso Preferred)	No	None
Stanford	Electronic (prefers its own site)	Yes	30,000 or less
Texas	Electronic (Expresso Preferred)	No	None
UCLA	Electronic (Expresso Preferred)	No	35,000 or less
Vanderbilt	Hard Copy	No	None
Virginia	Electronic	No	25,000 or less strongly preferred; not more than 30,000
William & Mary	Hard Copy	No	None
Wisconsin	Electronic (Expresso Preferred)	No	37,000 or less
Yale	Electronic (prefers its own site)	Yes	30,000 or less preferred; 35,000+ strongly discouraged

Posted by Daniel J. Solove at 08:30 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Law Review Forum at ELS Blog

The Empirical Legal Studies blog has hosted a great forum over the last few days, evaluating the Nance-Steinberg paper on law review submission practices. The first post is here, and there are eight others, featuring comments by Christine Hurt, Christopher Zorn, Ahmed Taha, and Ben Barton, among others, as well as the ELS regulars. It has been a remarkable discussion. Check it out.

Posted by Dave Hoffman at 06:39 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Law Review Article Selection: An Empirical Study

Leah Christensen (St. Thomas School of Law, MN) and Julie Oseid (St. Thomas, St. Thomas School of Law, MN) have posted on SSRN an article entitled Navigating the Law Review Article Selection Process: an Empirical Study of Those With All the Power—Student Editors. From the article:

The present study examines how law review editors at all levels of the law school “tier” system (e.g., Top 15, Top 25, Top 50, Top 100, Third Tier, Fourth Tier and Specialty Journals)13 weigh the importance of author credentials, topic, format, and timing of an article submission in making their selection decisions.

The study was based on a survey sent to student law review editors:

A qualitative survey methodology was adopted in order to access a large number of student editors, and to enable the editors’ responses to be compared across different groups and/or law school tiers. A 10 page self-completion survey was designed focusing on the following factors: author credentials; topic; title; star footnote; cover letter; reserved space; article format; timing of submission; review process; law review culture; “trading up;” and the “biggest surprise” about selecting articles for your journal. We left space for the editors to comment specifically about any one of the factors if they had additional information to provide.

The results:

Although the study found that most editors consider each of these factors to some degree, the data also suggests that the higher-ranked journals rely more heavily on author credentials than lower-ranked journals. Specifically, editors at higher-tiered law schools were highly influenced by where an author has previously published. Further, while not a single editor at a Top 15 school considered an author’s practice experience in making a publication decision, a majority of the editors at lower-tiered journals rated practice experience as an important factor in article selection. In addition, the study participants almost unanimously agreed that they were influenced by the topic of an article yet there were important differences among the law schools concerning the actual topics about which they would be most or least likely to publish.

One part of the article contains a week-by-week tally of number of article submissions to a Top 25 journal over the course of a year. The heaviest period of submissions was between February 20 and April 2 (the so-called "spring window"), with the busiest week being March 6-12, with 235 submissions. June and July were the slowest months. The fall window numbers were heaviest from August 7 to September 10, but the volume of submissions was not quite as high as the spring window -- though it was not too much lower. Overall the journal received 2,219 submissions.

The article is filled with some very interesting data. It is definitely worth checking out.

Posted by Daniel J. Solove at 03:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Excursus on the Beatles

I once heard a forlorn graduate student put a $20 bill in her dissertation in 1978, and when she returned to campus 20 years later to see if anyone had read her magnum opus, the bill was still there. Given that some proportion of law review articles never get cited, authors of the "long tail" of legal scholarship may want to develop some strategies to see if their own works are getting read. One strategy appears below the fold....

In the course of reading a footnote on the prudent man rule in a note discussing the liability of ratings agencies for bad ratings (75 Cornell L. Rev. 411), I found the following extended discussion of the Beatles:

For an excellent discussion of the infirmities of the prudent man rule, see . . . John Lennon & Paul McCartney, “Dear Prudence,”' The Beatles, (Columbia Records 1968) (detailing the Beatles's objections to the prudent man rule).

The members of the Beatles were well known advocates in the fight to abolish the prudent man-they called him a real “No Where Man.”' By ignoring the dictates of prudent investing, they were able to amass sizeable fortunes. They also wrote numerous songs in the fight to adopt a better set of fiduciary management rules, including “ERISA in the Sky with Diamonds,”' “A Day in the Life of a Trust Fund Manager,”' “The Ballad of John and Yoko's Money,”' “Back in the ERISA,”' and, of course, “Dear Prudence,”' an open letter to their mutual fund director, which later was set to music and became a hit in A major. In addition, they wrote numerous songs giving investment tips to the record-buying public. “Penny Lane”' was a nostalgic look back on the penny stocks, while “‘Magical Mystery Bourse”’ touted the advantages of investing on the Tokyo stock exchange.

“I'll Follow the SUN,”' which outlined John's contrarian strategy of investing based on the acronym, Stocks Undervalued Now, was the first major work questioning the strong form of the efficient capital markets hypothesis. George Harrison, too, was a rock economist: for example, “While my Accountant Gently Weeps”' outlined his despair at seeing his prudently invested trust funds losing their value. Even Ringo Starr joined the crusade for a better prudent man rule, recording “She's 16, She's Beautiful, and She's Mine,”' which told the story of his investment in Lockheed, which he bought at exactly one-fourth of its previous high of 64. The contrarian investment later soared.

Although the Beatles later broke up because of a fight over whether they should invest in tax-free municipals or high-growth equity investments, John Lennon and Paul McCartney did see eye-to-eye on the need for a better prudence standard. John Lennon released the poignant “Imagine,”' which painted the idyllic world where economics and efficiency would be the goal of all people, in the investment world or elsewhere. His words, as meaningful today as they were a decade and a half ago, were:

Imagine there's no prudence,
It isn't hard to do,
No U.S. bonds for us,
Higher returns too.
Imagine all the people,
Investing for today.
You may think I'm a dreamer,
But I'm not the only one,
We hope someday you'll join us,
With alphas over one.

A cold realist, John also released the haunting “Cold Turkey,”' the story of his agony when his subscription to the Wall Street Journal was inadvertently cut off due to post office error.

It is time to acknowledge the contribution of these young millionaires to the financial scene. Although their music no longer tops the charts, their investment strategies still top the financial charts. Every fund manager today owes these visionary rock economists an enormous debt that she cannot hope to repay, even with high-yielding, imprudent junk bonds.

Anyone want to send in their favorite "excursus" footnotes? The hyperfootnoted law review article may be a genre ripe for satire, and even, as in this piece, Dadaist revolt. (Hat tip for the Spam piece: Michael Madison.)

PS: The ratings agency article actually isn't even part of the uncited long tail--it's been used as authority in at least a couple cases.

Posted by Frank Pasquale at 12:50 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

The Economics of Law Reviews

I’ve suggested that part of the job of a student law review editor (especially an EIC) is to think strategically about increasing the use of her or his journal by the legal community. This might lead editors to recruit student authors to write doctrinal "mini-treatises" on a regular basis, or to aggressively promote articles to targeted lawyers and judges.

This reorientation of law reviews’ mission from pincites toward promotion has as yet failed to set the world on fire. A stumbling block is that law journals are structured inefficiently.

The economics of law reviews is obscure. Posner’s observation that "[t]o student editors, the cost of an author's time is zero . . ." was all I could find, though I value my time positively, so I didn’t look very long. Because schools subsidize journals, we know that the supply of articles sold is “inflated,” but we don’t know exactly to what extent. Some law review editors are paid – but that practice is shrouded in mystery too. (The by-laws of reviews available on the web are silent on pay issues). Here is what we do know.

Law schools subsidize law reviews with money and faculty time for three basic reasons, [1] to create quality signals and avoid the market for lemons; [2] to improve the school’s academic reputation (to mixed effect, as Al Brophy has demonstrated); and [3] to compete for entering students. A great deal of this looks to me like me-tooism: schools pay for journals because other uses of money are harder to explain. I don’t think that any law school subsidizes its law review in the hopes that it will one day make money by selling advertising or subscriptions. [Update: I've been reminded (in the comments below) that many believe that law reviews provide good educational experiences for their members, which is another reason schools might subsidize publication.]

Though certain (wonderful and wise) students may seek to promote legal scholarship, I imagine that most law students serve as editors for very practical reasons. Signaling is the most important. Apart from the general quality signal, membership on certain reviews may create a proxy for specialization in a practice area in a way the Bar does not otherwise permit. (Thus, if I were want to hire a water lawyer, I might look to those who have served on a natural resources journal.) Students may also seek (in Posner’s words) "useful training" in editing and citation.

The resulting market is interesting.

If students serve as law review editors mostly to warrant quality to employers, why has editing become bloated? A naive analysis might conclude that a student would spend as little time as possible editing, so as to maximize leisure. This analysis (no doubt) explains some editors' behavior, but there are countervailing factors.

First, each lower-level student may be signaling to her fellows something about her diligence, acuity, and carefulness, to advance in the internal tournament to become a member of the editorial board. When the time to vote comes along, that striving spader might hope that her fellows will say: “Geez, Dori spent months on that article adding pin-cites and notes! She deserves some reward!” Because students have few incentives to evaluate the quality of editing (who wants to cite-check another’s cite-checking?), the law review election process may be contributing to inefficiencies.

Second, editors too may be encouraged to seek quantity and not quality. No one will remember an editor who asks for too many citations (the theory goes): but an author burned by a miscite may go to the ends of the earth to pursue the editor who didn't catch it. Even to the extent that an editor has no academic ambitions, bloat in editing and writing is a safe strategy.

Unfortunately, no students have particularly good incentives to increase law review quality or citation. I know of no journal that pays its editors more if they increase the journals’ citation count, or (in an analogue to some law school's practice) "land" a citation in a Supreme Court opinion. (Though, citation in opinions is at best an imperfect gauge of an article’s impact on judges.) Given opportunity costs, the real compensation for editorship is deferred future salary. To the extent that editors do care about such matters, their reward for doing so is diffuse. (This is true even for “marketing editors”, who are attuned to circulation, not citation.) Thus, the current economic organization of law reviews results in predictably inefficient levels of editing, with insufficient attention to the actual quality of articles or their impact on the legal profession.

So, if you were a law school dean interested in remedying this agency cost problem, and increasing the visibility of your school's law review, what would you do? The default solution to agency costs is compensation structure. Maybe deans should pay editors who, at the end of their tenure, have increased their journals’ impact factor.

Unfortunately, this solution doesn’t work that well for term-limited student editors. By the time that any particular editors’ package of reforms has a chance to work, they will have moved on: increased citation will accrue to the benefit of another editor. Compensation schemes that would defer payment over the course of years are unwieldy, at best, and suppose a level of pay that is vastly higher than what I imagine most deans would agree to.

Judge Posner suggests instead that law reviews should be re-captured by schools and run by faculty. But, given tenure, this proposal is impractical and likely to be poorly run to boot. The sticks available to encourage diligent oversight by senior faculty are weak; junior faculty members are unlikely to believe that they internalize any law review prestige gains.

A better solution, I think, would be for law schools to hire part time promotions/marketing staff for law reviews, whose goal it would be to increase the use of the law review by the community, not its circulation. (I don’t know of any such folks, but I’d be happy to be corrected.) This seems like a good use of law school money, and a cheaper and less risky improvement of journals than the alternative - peer review. Marketers could help students to develop editing strategies, would encourage them to go online to promote articles, etc. Best of all, journal marketers could be encouraged through long-term compensation structures more effectively than students ever could be.

Posted by Dave Hoffman at 01:54 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Announcing the Law Review Forum Project

I am very pleased to announce a new project here at Concurring Opinions – the Law Review Forum Project. We will be hosting online forums for several law reviews. Increasingly, law reviews are creating online forums as companions to their regular law review issues. These forums contain very short response pieces, essays, debates, and other works that attempt to bridge the gap between regular legal scholarship and the blogosphere.

Journals seeking to create their own online forum face two daunting challenges. First, they must create and actively maintain a web presence. Second, they must find ways to attract readers, which is difficult in an age where so many blogs and other websites exist. A wide readership for a website depends upon having daily content. Law review forums produce content sporadically throughout the year at intervals that are not regular enough to attract a significant readership.

Therefore, we have invited a number of law reviews to participate in a partnership with our blog. Throughout the year, each law review will periodically post forum essays here at Concurring Opinions. We are not requiring an exclusive license, so participating law reviews can also cross-post at their own websites.

We see this as a mutually-beneficial arrangement. We can bring great content to our blog, and law reviews can reach our significant audience without the pressures of having to build and maintain an online readership or of having to produce content with regularity.

Law reviews currently with and without existing forums will be participating. Thus far, the following law reviews have agreed to participate:

* Harvard Law Review
* Virginia Law Review
* Michigan Law Review
* University of Pennsylvania Law Review
* Northwestern Law Review
* UCLA Law Review
* George Washington Law Review

In the near future, we hope to be expanding the list of participating law reviews.

Posted by Daniel J. Solove at 01:04 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Is It Harder to Get a Top Law Review Placement Today?

The other day, over at Conglomerate, Gordon Smith asked for data regarding law review rejection rates for article submissions.

I'm interested in collecting some data too -- but instead of rejection rates, I'm interested in historical submission data. I've long had a hypothesis, though I've lacked data to back it up. The hypothesis is this: Today, it is much harder to get a top law review placement than it was 20 years ago. Let's define a top law review placement as one in a top 20 law review (it doesn't matter whether it's the top 10, 20, 30, etc., so long as we agree on a particular number of journals). The number of article slots in the top 20 law reviews hasn't changed much -- each publishes roughly 12 to 18 articles a year. There are thus about 240 to 360 total slots each year -- on average probably around 300. I assume that the number of slots has remained relatively constant over time.

The number of law review article submissions, however, has almost certainly risen. Over the past 20 years, standards have changed in the legal academy to encourage more publishing. Whereas before, professors were expected to publish frequently only at some schools, now nearly all law schools expect professors to be prolific scholars. The result: More law review article submissions! And the math is simple -- more submissions are now chasing the same number of top law review slots.

I'm curious about the data. I wonder whether any law reviews have kept historical submission data. It would be interesting, for example, to know how many pieces were submitted to a given law review back in 1986 as opposed to 2006. Or back in 1976. Do any law review editors have access to this data? I'd be very interested to see the scope of the increase over the years.

Posted by Daniel J. Solove at 01:11 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

Expediting Life

What if the rest of the world was like law review submissions?

Law Review Submission: Dear Harvard, I've gotten an offer from Podunk State Law Journal, but I'd really rather publish with you. Please get back to me in four days.

Blogging: Dear Eugene, I've gotten an offer to post this at Co-Op, but I'd really rather post it with you. Please get back to me in four days.

Employment: Dear Prestigious Firm, I've gotten an offer from Starbucks, but I'd really rather work for you. Please get back to me in four days.

Teaching: Dear class, I've gotten an offer to teach you the Rule against Perpetuities, but I'd really rather go to the beach. Please get back to me in four days.

Dating: Dear Sally, I've gotten an offer from Jenny, but I'd really rather date you. Please get back to me in four days.

Foreign Policy: Dear Iran, I've gotten an offer to invade Iraq, but I'd really rather invade you. Please get back to me in four days.

The hereafter: Dear God, I've gotten an offer from Satan, but I'd really rather spend eternity with you . . .

Posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger at 12:41 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Law Review Rejection Rates

Over at the Conglomerate, Gordon Smith asks:

Quite apart from whether such a belief justifies the inference of quality, is it actually true that higher-ranked law reviews have higher rejection rates?

As far as I know, no one has gathered statistics on rejection rates. ExpressO ranks the Top 100 law reviews in terms of submissions through its service, but these rankings are somewhat skewed by the fact that several top law reviews do not accept ExpressO submissions. They also don't tell us how many articles were accepted at any of the law reviews.

Perhaps former law review editors can help shine some light on this question. If you have recent experience as a law review editor, please provide the following information in the comments: (1) the number of unsolicited submissions received by your law review during the editorial year, and (2) the number of offers made by your law review to authors of unsolicited submissions, and (3) the number of unsolicited submissions actually published. Obviously, this is informal, but I suspect that even a few responses would be quite enlightening.

Please answer Gordon's question in the comments to his post.

Posted by Daniel J. Solove at 01:22 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Submission Strategies in Response to the Shrinking Law Review Article Offer

Over at the VC, Orin Kerr examines the desirability of the increasing trend of law reviews to give "exploding" offers -- offers that expire in 1 day or 2 days. The law review submission process involves authors submitting simultaneously to multiple law reviews. Once the author gets an offer, she requests higher-ranked journals to conduct an expedited review. To make it harder for higher-ranked journals to conduct an expedited review, journals are giving out offers with shorter time windows. The effect: Whereas before journals had a week or two week to conduct an expedited review, now they have just a day or two.

Orin believes that this is problematic:

If this is in fact happening, I worry that it is on balance a bad thing for journals. First, I suspect that the perceived advantage to individual journals is mostly illusory: Journals might want to make fast offers and give a very short window to try to limit expedites, but my guess is that other journals are likely to respond by speeding up their expedite processes accordingly. And on a broader level, I'm concerned that journals that decide extremely quickly are likely to focus even more on the proxy of author/school prestige and less on the quality of the article. . . . On balance, then, tighter windows would seem to make the rich richer; it may be harder for excellent articles by lesser-known authors to break in to top journals.

I agree with Orin. The shrinking windows for law reviews to consider articles just rushes the process and threatens to make review more cursory. It is also a race to the bottom.

Check out Orin's post for some interesting comments.

My question is about submission strategy. The strategy for authors used to be to send to a bunch of law reviews, get an offer, and then slowly expedite in stages, working one's way up to the top law reviews. This strategy is deeply flawed today. Given the number of exploding offers, one has to expedite all the way to the top. And because many top law reviews have an extensive review process, if you want to be considered by them, there's often no way for them to review it in a 1 day or 2 day window.

So what should the strategy be for authors who want to maximize their placements?

Perhaps the following: One should submit in stages, with the top journals first, then followed by another group of journals a week or so later, then followed by successive waves at weekly or bi-weekly intervals, slowly working one's way down the rankings. In light of the ever-shrinking law review offer shelf life, is this the best strategy?

Posted by Daniel J. Solove at 12:02 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack