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The following was in today's online edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education.
MAGAZINES & JOURNALS
A glance at the November/December issue of "Legal Affairs":
Fixing what's wrong with law reviews
Law reviews use an editorial process that is "strange, even
incomprehensible, to scholars in other fields," says Richard A.
Posner, a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago's law
school and a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh
Circuit.
The journals are generally edited by students, have large
staffs, and do not use peer review. They are published
bimonthly, or more frequently, and are "seemingly unconstrained
in length," he writes.
The system evolved when legal scholarship was more a
professional activity than an academic one, he says, but now
that the character of legal scholarship has changed, the
weaknesses in the law-review system have become "both more
conspicuous and more harmful."
Legal scholars increasingly use insights from other disciplines
in analyzing law, and student editors are typically not
knowledgeable enough in those fields to provide editing
suggestions of much quality. But the quantity of time and staff
that the law reviews do possess allows them to "torment the
author with stylistic revisions," he writes.
The result, he says, is that "too many articles are too long,
too dull, and too heavily annotated, and that many
interdisciplinary articles are published that have no merit at
all."
Ideally, the solution would be for law schools to "take back"
their journals and give faculty members the primary editorial
duties, relegating students to tasks like checking citations.
But the current system is so valuable for training law students,
and for identifying particularly talented ones, that such a
reform, he says, is "too much to hope for."
The article, "Against the Law Reviews," is online at
http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/November-December-2004/review_
posner_novdec04.html
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