Reviews of Liptak's Review of Law Reviews (And a Brief Note on Immanuel Kant)

Today's New York Times has an article by Adam Liptak where he argues that Law Reviews are bad and that student editors of them are poor judges of what valuable scholarship is.

I don't have anything new to say to this that I haven't said before, mainly because Liptak's article doesn't say anything that hasn't been said before (for an older and far more delightful version, see my post on Fred Roddell here).  My main point on the article is to note that Liptak quotes Roddell, but apparently did not get the memo that if one's commentary is not novel, it should at least be fun to read.

I am not the first to point out that Liptak's article lacks novelty and charm. Matt Bodie calls the article "Lazy." Jeff Redding is a bit nicer and says that the article "was a bit surprising in its re-hashing of fairly unhelpful observations." Will Baude and Orin Kerr also have posts defending law reviews. Stephen Bainbridge approves of Liptak's argument, but notes that he is, at the moment, particularly irked by one law journal's failure to adhere to deadlines.  Above the Law seems to like the article, reprinting a source's quote in the article, and asking whether law reviews can get any worse, a question with an obvious answer (yes as an almost universal rule, things can always get worse) but the wrong question (right question: how can we make them better?).  Liptak, unsurprisingly and uncontroversially, mentions peer review as a possible answer (good call).

Finally, Liptak includes the oft-quoted line by Chief Justice John Roberts that “Pick up a copy of any law review that you see and the first article is likely to be, you know, the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in 18th century Bulgaria, or something, which I’m sure was of great interest to the academic that wrote it, but isn’t of much help to the bar.”

A Westlaw search of the Journals and Law Reviews database (query: ti(kant & bulgar! & evid!)), leads to zero hits. Roberts said that you should "pick up" a copy of any law review, indicating that he was speaking of recent issues that would be in Westlaw's database. The terms in my search all relate to the core components of Robert's example, and the hypothetical observer's ability to see this subject immediately indicates that these terms are present in the title.  Moreover, widening the search by removing "bulgar!" still led to zero hits.

I would not be surprised if removing "evid!" instead of "bulgar!" would also lead to zero hits.

(Update: I checked.  I'm correct).

ACTUAL UPDATE: Posts kept coming in as the day went on, and I felt that this one by Jack Chin was too nice to leave unmentioned.

ADDITIONAL UPDATE: Daniel Solove at Concurring Opinions (unsurprisingly) concurs.