Some blogs during October have discussed Judge Posner's article, Against the Law Reviews: Welcome to the World Where Inexperienced Editors Make Articles About the Wrong Topics Worse, 2004 (Dec) Legal Aff. 57. See Larry E. Ribstein, Micah Schwartzman, and Brian Leiter
Lots of interesting points made, though probably none that haven't been made many times before, given the extensive literature over many years that criticizes the institution of student-edited law journals. One thing that Leiter had to say did spark a thought on the burdens that law reviews place on library staff. Leiter says that one of the real purposes of student-edited law reviews is to "provide slave labor to law professors too lazy to properly cite-check and document their articles". One might add that the law library staff has an ancillary, and costly, role in abetting that process. Has any library ever presented their law review with a bill for the reference and interlibrary-loan costs of cite-checking? Still if author-from-X-law-school published with journal-from-Y-law-school, and then author-from-Y-law-school published with journal-from-X-law-school, maybe the costs balance out, but they're still real for law school libraries. Much of the costs, of course, are grounded in the non-economic decisions made by The Bluebook editors. When Bluebook changes were made that allowed law reviews to cite newspaper articles to at least Lexis and Westlaw, that was a boon for cost and efficiency. But the Bluebook emphasis is still solidly into pretending that authors looked at a paper copy when we know they mostly didn't. How often have ILL departments been asked for cite-checking purposes for the like of, the hard copy of an article that appeared on the website of PCWorld.com, or the hard copy of a statistical table at the Health & Human Services site? This emphasis on supplying physical copies of material the author didn't use is quite costly. A little more honesty to the source used by the author would be appreciated by author, editor, and library. Generally, more choice for authors would be a virtue. For those authors who think they've done a good job on their own editing, legal periodicals should give them a no-editing fast-track to publication. Or for those authors who want peer-review, send their article out for peer-review. There are no general law school law reviews that are refereed. In the realm of the specialized legal journal perhaps there are about 30 peer edited and about another 30 refereed journals that are associated with law schools. Some authors (particularly non-U.S., or social-science authors, or those publishing as a result of grants) might be attracted to a law review that offered them an option of having their article refereed. With over 700 U.S. legal journals competing for articles, it's certainly an advantage to authors of the present publishing system that anyone can get published somewhere. Law journals might want to gain a little competitive advantange by thinking of a cafeteria of offerings to authors.