Redding on Law Review "Best Practices"

Due to a number of academic deadlines (both in my own classes and in the class for which I am a teaching assistant), I have been unable to post very much this past weekend, and will probably not be able to write very much this week.  That said, I will do my best to keep on posting a few things, which brings me to this post by Jeff Redding of the Faculty Lounge.

I mentioned Redding's earlier reaction to Adam Liptak's critique of law reviews in my post here.  There, Redding proposed a conversation on how law reviews can better their scholarship.  He began with the suggestion that law schools generally refuse to publish the work of their own professors.

In his most recent post, Redding offers this previous suggestion and several other suggestions on how to better structure the presentation of legal scholarship and its treatment in the academy:

1) Every U.S. law school should have a written policy disallowing their own faculty from submitting articles for consideration to any law review edited by that school’s students, unless it is a symposium issue or there is some other ‘legitimate’ reason. Simultaneously, every student-edited U.S. law review should have a policy automatically refusing consideration to any article submitted by any faculty member of the law school to which that law review belongs, with caveats such as those just mentioned. (This is a repeat proposal from my last blog post on this subject.) 

2) Every U.S. law review should, at the beginning of every article published by it (e.g. in the * footnote), explain that law review’s ‘methodology’ for soliciting, reviewing, and choosing articles for publication. 

3) When listing publications on their academic CVs, authors should prominently indicate, for each U.S. law review publication, whether that publication was published in a student-edited or a peer-reviewed journal. 

4) When evaluating junior law faculty candidates for promotion, publications in peer-reviewed journals should be granted a weight at least as weighty as publications in student-edited law reviews. Perhaps it should continue to be the case that publications in student-edited journals will count (as they presently do most everywhere) for promotion from assistant to associate professor but, for promotion from associate to full professor, there must be publications in peer-reviewed journals. Or perhaps there should be evidence of publications in both student-edited and peer-reviewed journals at each stage of promotion. I am less interested in the details of the particular mix here, but only suggest a mix to reaffirm the importance of (pre-publication) peer-review, while confirming my lack of interest in shutting down (the market for) student-edited law reviews.

I'm not really sure that these suggestions are good ideas, or if they are acceptable, I don't think that these suggestions will make much of a difference.

As for the first suggestion, that journals not publish professors from their schools, I think that this would be a serious limitation for schools with law reviews that have specialized reputations that align with their school's reputation.  For instance, the UCLA Law Review has a reputation for publishing noteworthy critical race scholarship, but eliminating all UCLA professors from publication consideration would put a sizeable dent in the critical race scholarship the law review could  consider.  Also, schools like Harvard and Yale may have a lot of well-regarded professors who are producing very important scholarship, which would raise the cost of prohibiting publication of these professors in those schools' law reviews.

Regarding the second suggestion, I think that an indication of selection methodology would become vague and repetitive, since pretty much all law reviews likely employ a calculus selecting scholarship that appears "novel, likely to be relied upon in future scholarship and opinions, of broad interest and importance, and timely."  These works would likely have been selected from ExpressO and direct submissions and slated by the articles board.  Having predicted what I expect to be around 85 - 90 percent of these asterisk footnotes, I'm not sure how much they would add.

The third suggestion sounds like a good idea, but from the CVs I have seen, it looks like a lot of professors are doing this already.

And I do not have much to say with the fourth suggestion due to my lack of familiarity with the promotion of professors, but I would be surprised if publication in peer-reviewed journals did not carry some weight of its own in the process.  If that is not already the case, I agree with Redding's suggestion here.

I doubt that anything substantial will change in this process, since criticism of law reviews has been a subject of discussion for a very long time, yet legal scholarship has persisted in its traditions.