Posner on law reviews

It's taken me awhile to catch up with Judge Posner's slam on student-edited law reviews and Brian Leiter's comments. Posner criticizes, among other things, law students' lack of expertise in selecting articles and the perverse effects of the editing process.

Leiter adds:

[S]tudent-edited law reviews have been crucial for many of the most intellectually insubstantial developments in "legal scholarship" over the past thirty years: from Critical Legal Studies to postmodern legal theory; from the rise of armchair social science in connection with the "social norms" fad in legal scholarship to the new fascination with evolutionary biology in legal scholarship.

I had a thread back last May, which can be tracked from here, in which I said some of the same things Judge Posner did, and speculated that law reviews' days might be numbered -- perhaps to be replaced by something like SSRN.

But in my first post I also offered this Hayekian defense, which is worth keeping in mind:

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 . . . blocking publication.

This is a virtue that would disappear if law students' role in law reviews were reduced to cite-checking, as Posner recommends. So the choice may be between too much bad stuff and not enough good stuff. The first kind of error would seem to be the less serious one, given the presumed sophistication of the ultimate audience. As for the low quality of the student-edited product -- if these problems are serious enough, the market can develop additional outlets.

Finally, the problem of bad or excessive editing would seem to be addressed by the competition among law reviews for the best articles and most prestigious authors, who would seem to have some market power. For example, I understand that a major law review almost adopted a plan a few years ago to let authors opt out of the editing process.