I’m late to the party in blogging about the recent shift in law review article length policies, as described, for example, here. In a nutshell, after endless doorstop articles, some of the top journals have agreed (where is antitrust policy when you need it?) that they will from now on presumptively favor articles of no more than 25,000 words in length, including footnotes (which is where all scores are settled, wit is unleashed, etc.), and will only publish articles of more than 35,000 words in extraordinary circumstances.
I’ve got no special problem with that as a rule of thumb. Granted, my forthcoming article is over 100 pages, and even my freaking blog entries are so long they need a concordance and a super-computer to process all the information. But generally, asking legal scholars to cut to the chase is almost certainly a good thing. It will be particularly interesting to see whether this actually cuts the length of submissions, which it is likely to do, and if so whether scholars publish more, and more direct, pieces. It also creates an interesting secondary market competition for longer pieces, which competing law reviews would do well to keep in mind.
What strikes me about as odd, though, is that the rule fundamentally serves the same purpose as the old “rule” — the tendency to accept and publish overlong articles. Rules can, at a minimum, serve two purposes: they can be a proxy for considered judgments based on experience that has already accumulated, or they can be a proxy for considered judgments that the decision-maker lacks the knowledge to make.
I think this new policy tends toward the second. Why were long articles published?
Because, in the absence of expertise in the area — which law review editors, by dint of inexperience, often lack — editors assumed that “more” meant “more impressive.” Why do they now insist on publishing shorter pieces? Because they still lack the tools to distinguish between good and bad long pieces (except in “extraordinary circumstances,” which is a way of saying that the article is self-evidently terrific or the author is self-evidently famous), so they asked the experts what they preferred. As Family Feud’s Richard Dawson would say, Survey Said: shorter articles! And the law reviews said: Make it so.
In either case, however, I think a presumptive policy for or against long articles is really a kind of confession of uncertainty. If you could faithfully and expertly evaluate the quality of articles, you wouldn’t need this kind of presumption at all. And so I am left thinking the policy shift is probably a good one, but also kind of an acknowledgement of the continuing question:
Why let law students run law reviews in the first place?
I mean this gently. I edited a law review, and found the experience very rewarding. But note that it was in Canada, where students don’t run most law reviews (thus my review published student pieces only, although I think of a very high quality), where most faculty reviews involve the peer-review process common to other disciplines. And because, unlike the American law review system, there was a more tenuous link between law review editorship and future employment prospects, pretty well the only people who stuck with it really wanted to do so, without regard to career prospects. (Which may explain why so many former editors of the U of T student law review went on to academic careers.)
Of course, none of this touches the fundamental proxy for quality that remains, I think, quietly in effect at many law reviews: publish the most famous people you can get. At least this is what one top-tier law review editor, then a summer associate at my firm, not just admitted but bragged. This, too, is rational, but it raises questions about the whole enterprise.
Update: Orin at TVC is doing a survey on the matter.
Posted by Paul Horwitz on April 20, 2005 at 07:43 AM
Comments
What I know of copyright law is very limited, so while this seems like it fits under fair use; I could be off the mark.
From a public interest standpoint, I think the more choices that the film industry can provide the public, the better. If there is a newer market for this (since the movie studios themselves already produce similar versions for TV and airline movies) that these guys are providing a product for – good for them and the people who want to buy the product.
Posted by: MJ | Apr 20, 2005 12:09:06 PM