Law Review Word Limits and the Limits of Editorial Control

Over at his blog, Stephen Bainbridge remarks that Harvard and Yale are publishing numerous articles well in excess of their stated page limits, despite earlier remarks by the journals that they would take efforts at limiting the length of articles.  He points out that, remarkably, all of the articles in Harvard and Yale's most recent issues exceeded the journals' stated word/page limits.

Bainbridge concludes his post with:

So are law review word limits just a joke? The problem is that after checking Harvard and Yale, I got bored. So I don't know if there are other journals out there enforcing the rules more strictly. At the very least, however, it seems that Harvard and Yale are just joshing us. 

So my advice is: Write the article to the length you need and ignore the word limits.

I think that Bainbridge is right to point out the problem of overly long articles, which is a common phenomenon in the world of legal scholarship.  Earlier this year, when I was looking through article submissions for the UCLA Law Review with the other articles editors, we found that many articles we received were well in excess of the journal's 35,000 word limit.

I do think, however, that there might be a few things going on beneath the surface that make the situation more complicated than it seems on its face.

For one, law reviews that publish articles in excess of their word limits may have limited choices of what to select for publication.  In my experience, the majority of the articles we received were very close to, or exceeded UCLA Law Review's word limits.  Some of these articles were quite good.  Some of the shorter articles were not so good -- and regardless of quality there were often far fewer short articles to choose from.  While articles that were too long were less likely to be accepted, they sometimes stood out from the rest as the best submissions.  In today's world of legal scholarship, where long, published articles are the norm, long, submitted articles are also the norm.

More significantly, journals have a limited level of editorial control over articles once the articles are accepted for publication.  While many law journals reserve the right to refuse publication or require alterations in egregious circumstances (such as blatant errors or plagiarism), beyond those narrow circumstances, law journals' editorial preferences are suggestions, rather than requirements.  So if a law journal accepts an article for publication that ends up growing much longer over the course of the publication process, there is probably very little that the journal will be able to do about that.

Accordingly, I would offer a revised version of Bainbridge's suggestion to those authors who still wish to publish overly long articles: write the article within the journal's suggested word limits, and save your excess text and discussion for after it is accepted for publication.

Or, buck the trend and try to have a concise end product.  If I am looking through articles while researching a subject, I will be much more likely to read a 30-page article than a 70-page article.  I have a strong feeling that my preference is shared by other readers and researchers.