Foreword: Reflections on our Founding (original) (raw)

The Idea of the Law Review: Scholarship, Prestige, and Open Access

2006

Abstract This Essay was written as part of a Symposium on open access publishing for legal scholarship, held at Lewis & Clark Law School. It makes the claim that “open access” publishing models will succeed, or not, to the extent that they account for the existing “economy of prestige” that drives law reviews and legal scholarship.

The Law Review Approach: What the Humanities Can Learn

Academic Questions, Vol. 26, Issue 1, 2013

This essay describes how the law review process generally works and then discusses what the humanities can learn and borrow from the law review process. It ends by advocating for a hybrid law review/peer review approach to publishing. The law review process is not a panacea for our publishing ills. It has several drawbacks and shortcomings. This essay highlights the positives and notes some of the negatives of the law review publishing process, but a lengthy explanation of all that is good or bad about law reviews is not my aim. Every law review has its idiosyncrasies and methodologies, but most share certain overarching procedures and protocols that can be evaluated in terms of their similarity.

Law Review Scholarship in the Eyes of the Twenty-First Century Supreme Court Justices: An Empirical Analysis

2012

An analysis of the twenty-first century Justices’ citations of law review scholarship—how often they cite articles, the professional identities of authors of the cited articles, and the rankings of the law reviews in which the cited articles appear—provides an excellent prism through which to assess today’s law reviews. In addition to having had varied and rich legal careers as practitioners, policy-makers, and lower court judges, the majority of the current Justices were, at earlier points in their careers, full-time law professors. Presumably, the Justices are able to separate the wheat from the chaff in the law reviews. The present study examined whether something meaningful can be gleaned from an analysis of the modern Justices’ practice of citing law review articles. This article describes the results of an empirical study of the nearly two thousand “signed” opinions authored by the Justices—majority opinions, plurality opinions, concurring opinions, and dissenting opinions iss...

Law Journals: From Discourse to Pedagogy

Legal Education Review, 2015

Law journals 1 are a seemingly perennial feature of the university law school landscape in common law jurisdictions. To an uninformed observer, they may appear as benign manifestations of university life and as refined vehicles for academic debate about theory and policy. This image belies the fact that they have been the subject, especially in the United States, of highly polemical and often vociferous battles about their worth and proper role. A large amount of literature has been published in American law journals about the journals themselves. The academic literature on Australian law journals, by contrast, has to date been relatively undeveloped. 2 Law journals in Australia and the United Kingdom have attracted little attention and have tended to escape the prolonged controversies surrounding their publication in the United States. 3 Whereas American attention has focused to a significant degree

The Value of Legal Writing, Law Review, and Publication

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

While highly developed communication skills contribute substantially to success in other professions and in our personal relationships, legal research and writing is likely the foundation for a successful career in the law. Law review articles are cited by judges in their opinions, by Congress and regulatory authorities in the making of law, and regulations and policy. Any great legal orator, litigator, or Supreme Court Justice will need the benefit of quickly recognizing legally significant fact patterns, the ability to conduct research regarding statutory and case law, and the ability to make compelling, cogent legal arguments. The experience gained from legal research and writing sharpens all these tools. I m hopeful this Article may become a required-reading as one of the first assignments for all incoming first-year law students, or even before any classes begin. Presented first is a brief examination of why lawyers do not write well. Second, is a description of the law review: its value; a brief history of the American law journal experience; the editor selection process; who does what on law reviews; and the number and type of law journals. Thoughts about the writing process and important considerations regarding law review writing in particular are then presented. Reflections by recent law journal editors about their law review experiences are offered, along with suggestions about how authors may improve their manuscripts. Following that, the who, what, where and when of the publication process is covered. Comments about the Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN) are presented, then followed by a brief discussion about the currency value of citations. I believe this Article starts a

Legal Journals: In Pursuit of a More Scientific Approach

European Journal of Legal Education, 2005

In 1942, the American sociologist of science, Robert Merton, suggested as one of the norms of academic science that universities ought to be places of 'organised scepticism'. Academic law journals should contribute to this mission, since the quality of an academic discipline largely depends on the quality of its publication culture. Informed by the American experiences including the dominant law reviews, and by contrast an international medical journal, this article tries to obtain a better view of the publication culture involving legal scholarship and the possibilities of improving it. The American format of the law review is generally very distant from the form of publication used in most other disciplines and from legal publications in many other parts of the world. One of the major problems of the legal discipline is that non-Americans generally do not publish in American law reviews vice versa. As a consequence, a proper, worldwide academic exchange of ideas is hindered. With the exception of a few journals, the world remains divided. This inhibits progress in legal scholarship. If a 'world format' for a legal article is to be adopted, the European model seems more appropriate than the American one.

The Law Review Article

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2016

What is a law review article? Does America know? How might we help America in this regard? Here, we approach the first question on the bias: As we have found, a growing body of learning and empirical evidence shows that genres are not merely forms, but forms that anticipate their substance. In this Article, then, we try to capture this action by undertaking the first and only comprehensive "performative study" of the genre of the law review article.

Bypassing Bias: How Law Reviews Circumvent Favoritism

Academic Questions, 2013

Could peer-reviewed humanities journals benefit by having student editors, as is the practice for law reviews? Are student editors valuable because they are less likely than peer reviewers to be biased against certain contributors and viewpoints? Student editors of and contributors to law reviews may seem to be the notable exception, but legal scholarship is different from humanities scholarship in ways I address here, and law reviews suffer from biases similar to those endemic to peer-reviewed journals. Nevertheless, law review submission and editing probably have less systemic bias than peer-reviewed journals, but not because students edit them. Rather, law review submission and editing make it more difficult for bias to occur. The system, not the students, facilitates editorial neutrality.