Gordon Smith has an interesting post on the value for law students of the law review experience. But he doesn't get into what for many is the big question -- what is the value of the law review product?
Many people, particularly academics from other fields not steeped in the law review system, wonder about having barely trained students making basic decisions about what academic work gets published. Law reviews are holdovers from much simpler times when law reviews and law students were few and legal issues were just legal issues. Now there is a wide range of student and law school quality, the law itself has grown extremely complex, and articles cover everything from economics to philosophy. How can second-year law students handle this?
The virtue of the law review system is that it provides a law school subsidized outlet for just about anything a law professor or lawyer wants to publish. The system lets a million flowers bloom and lets this vibrant intellectual market ultimately decide merit. There is no lengthy bottleneck at a few peer reviewed journals, no chance that widely shared intellectual prejudices (such as we have seen on the causes of Alzheimer's disease) blocking publication.
The problem, of course, is that there's little vetting or intermediation. The quality of the law school publishing the review says something about the intelligence of the students, but there's only so much they can really understand, and the quality variations aren't that great. Once out there, the writer's reputation and other quality signals matter more.
Moreover, there is an alternative -- the Social Science Research Network, which makes thousands of working papers free on line with no real review process. If the purpose is to disseminate work and let the market decide based on the author's reputation, this would seem to be the way to go. And SSRN does have a kind of vetting process measured in number of downloads.
So maybe Gordon is right to focus on law reviews as training. Maybe the urge to publish in law reviews is sustained mainly by professional traditions (guarded by those who served time on law reviews). This doesn't seem like a long-term equilibrium.
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