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jrs12 wrote:I thought it was a little weird too. That was before I actually started editing.

Try seeing the crap that professors actually have the balls to submit. I would be humiliated if I sent my work out in such sloppy condition. Most of the stuff I do is really not a judgment call. I could have 10 other people on the staff look at it and they'd all laugh and agree.

I doubt Posner's experience is the norm. He's one of the most talented legal writers of the last century, and he's almost certainly the most diligent. Most writers are truly dependent on student editors' services, menial though they may be.

Also, regarding specific areas of expertise: on a staff of over 80, we've got someone with legitimate experience in just about every field that could be addressed, and we staff the articles accordingly. Granted, we don't interact with the writers as intellectual peers, but that's not our purpose. The accelerated time frame and high volume of scholarship in legal academia means that it's far more practical for the intellectual give-and-take to happen across articles. Co-authorship is also a common way for a professor to get substantive cooperation from a respected peer, beyond just the informal academic conversations that have been the foundation of academic thought for thousands of years.

steve_nash wrote:I'm sure Posner writes great articles, but some of the articles professors sent my law review are downright sh-t. One professor sent an article that basically had to be cut and pasted together and contained blanks for almost every footnote. I do wish the faculty were more involved with the editorial process, as I do feel intellectually inadequate to be making or suggesting substantive edits to a prof's work.

first emerged in the latter part of the 19th century, when legal scholarship was primarily a professional rather than an academic product. Its primary aim was to serve judges and practicing lawyers, rather than other professors, by offering careful doctrinal analysis, noting, for example, divergent lines of authority and trying to reconcile them.

disco_barred wrote:

steve_nash wrote:I'm sure Posner writes great articles, but some of the articles professors sent my law review are downright sh-t. One professor sent an article that basically had to be cut and pasted together and contained blanks for almost every footnote. I do wish the faculty were more involved with the editorial process, as I do feel intellectually inadequate to be making or suggesting substantive edits to a prof's work.

When they're that bad, why do you accept / edit them? I thought it was hard to get something published, even as a prof?

disco_barred wrote:While we're on the topic of law review theory / best practice, any tips for (potential) student authors? Things to do / not do, topics to look for / avoid, etc.?

edcrane wrote:I also don't find his comments about over-citing persuasive. Sure, the demand for cites for virtually all propositions makes LR articles FN heavy, but it also ensures that authors aren't simply making stuff up (it happens) and makes it easier to critically analyze the article. If you don't want to read the FNs, don't. It's not that tough to keep your eyes above the line.

disco_barred wrote:

steve_nash wrote:I'm sure Posner writes great articles, but some of the articles professors sent my law review are downright sh-t. One professor sent an article that basically had to be cut and pasted together and contained blanks for almost every footnote. I do wish the faculty were more involved with the editorial process, as I do feel intellectually inadequate to be making or suggesting substantive edits to a prof's work.

When they're that bad, why do you accept / edit them? I thought it was hard to get something published, even as a prof?

apper123 wrote:How common is it for students to get their articles widely cited after they are published? I feel like that would be pretty cool. I used a phenomenal law review article written by a student from the early 90s for a research project recently, and I noticed it had been widely cited not only by other articles, but by legal encyclopedias and federal district courts(!!!). Of course I google the guy's name and, as I suspected, he's now a law professor.

TTT-LS wrote:

disco_barred wrote:While we're on the topic of law review theory / best practice, any tips for (potential) student authors? Things to do / not do, topics to look for / avoid, etc.?

As in, to get published by another school's journal? Or your own? The two are really separate questions.

Many of the revisions they suggest (or impose) exacerbate the leaden, plethoric style that comes naturally to lawyers (including law professors). According to an article written by James Lindgren at Northwestern Law School in the Chicago Law Review, one law review editor "thought that many uses of the word 'the' in an article were errors. Following this bizarre rule of thumb, he took as many 'thes' out of manuscripts as he could, thus reducing many sentences to a kind of pidgin."

jrs12 wrote:I thought it was a little weird too. That was before I actually started editing.

Try seeing the crap that professors actually have the balls to submit. I would be humiliated if I sent my work out in such sloppy condition. Most of the stuff I do is really not a judgment call. I could have 10 other people on the staff look at it and they'd all laugh and agree.

I doubt Posner's experience is the norm. He's one of the most talented legal writers of the last century, and he's almost certainly the most diligent. Most writers are truly dependent on student editors' services, menial though they may be.

Also, regarding specific areas of expertise: on a staff of over 80, we've got someone with legitimate experience in just about every field that could be addressed, and we staff the articles accordingly. Granted, we don't interact with the writers as intellectual peers, but that's not our purpose. The accelerated time frame and high volume of scholarship in legal academia means that it's far more practical for the intellectual give-and-take to happen across articles. Co-authorship is also a common way for a professor to get substantive cooperation from a respected peer, beyond just the informal academic conversations that have been the foundation of academic thought for thousands of years.

Q: Judge Richard Posner '62, himself a former president of the Harvard Law Review, has derided the honored place of student-run law reviews in America, stating, "[the] system of student-edited law reviews, with all its built-in weaknesses, has persisted despite a change in the character of legal scholarship that has made those weaknesses both more conspicuous and more harmful to legal scholarship…Because the students are not trained or experienced editors, the average quality of their suggested revisions is low." Does Judge Posner have a point?

A: I have little desire to go head-to-head with Judge Posner—though since you've quoted him, perhaps I should note that even he has admitted, in a blogged debate with Randy Kozel about the usefulness of student-run law reviews, that the Review provided him with "excellent suggestions" and "a number of very helpful suggestions" on at least two of his pieces. More generally, I think that student-edited law reviews can and do provide a useful service to legal scholarship and that the usual alternative proffered—peer review—is no panacea.

Student editors are able to spend more time and effort on the editing process than I imagine most professors would be willing to do. Given the commitment of our editors, I believe that we can provide a more thorough set of edits and can complete those edits more quickly than most other types of publication.

In addition, having pieces selected and reviewed by student editors may help prevent legal scholarship from splintering into a collection of law-and-something's that can no longer converse with one another. Although we realize that our editors cannot have the same expertise as professors in the field, that very absence of specialization means that we can provide a space for articles relevant to a general legal audience. Our lack of specialization also may guard against the problems of insular thinking and rigid orthodoxy that might arise within small, specialized communities of scholars.

Peer-reviewed journals still will have problems. Critics of peer review in scientific research journals have noted a variety of flaws in the process: difficulties verifying research, theoretical and methodological biases, subjectivity, and variations in peer review practices at different journals. I think that similar problems exist for peer-reviewed legal publications, and so it's very unclear to me that all of those publications would necessarily be better than all student-edited publications.

Furthermore, the Review combines the strengths of student-editing with some of the strengths of peer-reviewed journals. Prior to selection, we send potential articles to faculty members for review and comments, and that commentary is used in our decisions of which pieces to accept. In addition, we do not prevent authors from gathering feedback from their peers through conferences or publication of drafts in places like SSRN.

Of course, I have no opposition to the existence or establishment of peer-reviewed publications or other forms of publication that can contribute to our field. For all of these reasons, I believe that there is a place in legal scholarship for student-edited law reviews.