Last post for now (the only other thing I might add is that it is wicked cold here).



Garret Morritz (a second post here), Nate Oman (a second post here), and several members of the Volokh Horde (Juan, Sasha, and Orin) have recently engaged in an interesting discussion of the age old question of law reviews. That is: Is a wholly student-run (and edited) law review a good thing? They cover most of the ground, so I won't go into it here. I want to add that I think Garret has an excellent point--the value of student-run law reviews aside, you're going to have a very hard time getting students to continue doing the intense sourceciting (he calls it "subciting") that is done if you take away their power over the selection of pieces.



I would take the middle road in the debate. I think there is immense value to having students do the sourceciting. Law students, anal by nature, do an excellent job of running down cites and ensuring accuracy. Juan's point is excellent:

Another distinguishing feature of legal publications is that footnotes and citations are verified by the editors. For those readers unfamiliar with law reviews, let me make this absolutely clear. The standard protocol for law reviews is that each and every footnote is verified for its accuracy by the editors of the law review. Quotes are checked; dates verified; supporting authorities examined; and so on. It is a laborious process (one with which I was all too familiar in my law school days), but one that makes legal academic publications reliable in a fashion that other academic publications are not. . . .



I believe that these two aspects of legal academic publications--student editors and citation checking--are related. We only have the latter because we have the former. Academics may be willing to peer review each other's work, but they surely would never consent to spend hours in the library verifying the accuracy of footnotes. Nor does the typical academic journal have sufficient resources to compensate graduate students to perform this task. As a result, many non-legal academic publications are less likely to uncover fraudulent or misleading research in manuscripts accepted for publication.



The only reason law students are willing to engage in the tedious process of fact-checking dozens upon dozens of footnotes is that they are compensated for their efforts with editorial positions on law reviews, and the prestige and stature which can accompany such positions. Serving on law review can be necessary for positions at many high-dollar law firms or with prominent judges. Ending student-edited law reviews would, I suspect, greatly diminish the potential labor pool for cite-checking, and the demise of cite-checking would eliminate law reviews' comparative advantage vis-a-vis other academic publications.

Orin does make a good point in his anecdote about the Yale Journal on Regulation:

I'm quite sure the editors did not try to duplicate my results before publishing the paper. In fact, come to think of it I don't think they asked for a copy of my underlying data. I don't mean that as a criticism of the Journal, which did a fine job editing the paper; rather, I think it reflects a common attitude of law review editors towards the papers they publish.

This seems to me, however, a problem that is less apparent at some other journals (as Orin acknowledges, practices vary from law review to law review). Like Garret says, some law reviews cite-check twice for every piece. By way of contrast, a recent study asserts that many scientists simply cut and paste in citations from other papers, with errors and all, without reading original work. And in related news, a Bell Labs scientist was discredited earlier this year for having published phony results in journals such as Science and Nature.



The flipside, of course, is the concern that students are not competent to be selecting pieces for legal scholarship. I have had this worry many a time in my own Journal work. The solution here is that many of the top tier journals get faculty consults on pieces before they accept them. We are perfectly capable of screening out pieces that are largely preempted (the miracles of on-line research). We can then get faculty consultations (usually more than one faculty consult for every piece we accept) on the pieces we think are promising.

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