For those of you who do not subscribe to the Journal an interesting piece on law reviews, law review articles, etc.  Comments are welcome and in fact encouraged. 
Rick

Notes From the Ivory Tower: Law Reviews Adapt to New Era

By BRANDT GOLDSTEIN 
Special to THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
February 21, 2006

Editor's Note: Notes From the Ivory Tower, an occasional feature, looks at the effect certain ideas and trends within the legal academy are having on the practice of law and the business world. If you have an idea for a Notes From the Ivory Tower feature, please email us at [log in to unmask], and please put Ivory Tower in the subject line.

Last month, Rosa Brooks, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School, tossed out a provocative thought on LawCulture2, a blog about law and legal academia. Ms. Brooks questioned whether she would ever write again for the law reviews -- the hefty journals that publish scholarly works by legal academics. "I dutifully churned out law review articles to fill my tenure file," Ms. Brooks wrote. "[But] I'm fairly sure that practically no one outside my tenure committee and my mother has actually read the damn things (and I have my doubts about my mom)."

The post provoked a flurry of comments from other law professors, a number of whom applauded her plans to focus instead on books, op-eds, and blogging. One poster advised her to "give up the law reviews cold turkey," while another declared that "law review articles stand at the pinnacle of the scholarly research dung heap."

For years, publishing in journals has been a prerequisite to getting tenure or to moving to a more prestigious institution. And for just as long, scholars and laypeople have criticized the stultifying style of legal academic articles, which tend to be extraordinarily long (sometimes 100 pages or more), dense, and endlessly -- even sadistically -- footnoted.

But the most recent wave of criticism has been especially costly to the legal journals. More than any other time in the past, law professors are looking beyond law reviews, moving relevant and timely commentary to the Internet and the blogosphere.

The law reviews, it seems, have gotten the message. From insisting on briefer pieces to creating new and timely Internet features that engage broader audiences, the law reviews are experimenting with ways to reaffirm their significance to the profession. Whether the efforts will pay off is still an open question, but the law reviews have at least made it clear that they will not go down without a fight.

Several factors have led to the current law review crisis. First off, there are issues of length and scholarly authority. Unlike journals in most other fields, law reviews are run by students rather than seasoned scholars. This means, as Judge Richard Posner complained in a December 2004 Legal Affairs article, that J.D.s-to-be with just two years of legal training are selecting and editing the articles to be published in the law reviews. Some scholars say the system encourages poor decisions about which articles to publish -- and provides for an unhelpful editing process. In particular, since students have no expertise in any specific area of law, they often press their authors to flesh out an article with more and more background material, creating end products that can take up as much space as four or five pieces in, say, a scholarly political science or economics journal.

Law school faculties have also contributed to the problems facing law reviews. For one thing, professors have made little effort to reassert the editorial control they often exercised when law reviews were first established. Judge Posner recently called for faculty to "take back" their schools' law reviews, but acknowledged that such reform might be "too much to hope for."

Furthermore, according to Daniel Solove of the George Washington University Law School, professors shoulder much of the blame for the plodding prose of many law review articles. "We academics," he recently blogged5, "like to dress up our ideas to make them sound more elaborate, complex, and obtuse." When it comes to article length, tenure committees often don't help matters, says a junior professor at a law school in California. "It's a self-perpetuating process," he explains. "Senior faculty had to produce massive articles in their own bids for tenure, so now we're expected to do the same thing."

The focus of much current scholarship -- theoretical work with no real application for judges, practitioners, or policymakers -- has reduced the audience for it outside the legal academy. Hard statistics on law review readership are hard to come by, but anecdotal evidence suggests that practitioners simply don't pay much attention to them these days. "There was a time in my career when I relied on the law reviews far more than I do now," says Sol Wisenberg, a criminal defense attorney and former deputy under Kenneth Starr at the Office of the Independent Counsel. "[But] I get much better information for my practice through other publications."

Twenty years ago, little outside of the occasional book or magazine article deflected attention from law reviews. Today, legal blogs are siphoning away the attention of law professors and lawyers on issues of the day. Blogs such as The Volokh Conspiracy6, Opinio Juris7, and SCOTUSBlog8 attract tens of thousands of readers and feature informed discussion on everything from constitutional theory to law-related television shows. Blogs now occupy so many professors, in fact, that at the American Association of Law Schools annual conference, a panel was held to debate the influence of blogs in the legal academic community.

Facing the defection of both academics and practitioners, law review editors are making changes. For starters, they're trying to make their articles shorter. Eleven leading law reviews issued early last year a collective statement9 pledging to rethink their publication policies, and several journals have now set forth formal policies calling for shorter articles. While the results have only started to come in, the editors-in-chief at several major law reviews, including the University of Virginia, Harvard, and Yale, report that most submissions are abiding by the guidelines.

The law reviews are also turning to another strategy -- moving content to the Internet -- to boost readership. The law schools at Harvard and Yale, for instance, have both introduced special web-based supplements to their print publications. Yale's new feature, called The Pocket Part10, runs synopses of selected articles from the print version, along with short responses from both practitioners and scholars. Material on The Pocket Part reads much like traditional opinion pieces, in keeping with Yale's instructions to contributors: "You should write as if you were contributing an op-ed to a popular newspaper or magazine." The most recent Pocket Part, posted before the Alito hearings, summarized an article on a proposed new methodology for Senate questioning of Supreme Court nominees.

At the same time, some newer journals have jettisoned print publication altogether and are operating purely as online publications. Much like web-based publications outside of the law, they're geared toward briefer, more timely writings. The Duke Law & Technology Review11, for instance, publishes twice a month during the academic year, focusing mostly what it calls "iBriefs" -- short, accessible pieces on emerging legal issues of interest both to practitioners and lay people. Among the journal's recent pieces: a discussion of Internet sales taxes.

Law reviews are also going beyond the Web, however, to reach wider audiences. Take, for example, the October 2005 issue of the Stanford Law Review, which focused exclusively on the impact of two Supreme Court rulings -- United States v. Booker12 and Blakely v. Washington13 -- that together invalidated large parts of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. Stanford sent the issue, which includes contributions from many of the nation's top sentencing scholars, to every member of Congress, every federal trial and appellate judge, and federal and state sentencing commissions.

The effort was a departure for the journal. Chris Walker, the Stanford Law Review's managing editor, says the publication's past articles on criminal law tended to be long and theoretical. "But [the October 2005] articles were shorter and more policy-oriented," he says. "We wanted scholars to be able to give their input to Congress and judges in an organized and useful fashion."

Will these new approaches increase law review readership? University of Pittsburgh School of Law professor Bernard Hibbitts has his doubts. Professor Hibbitts points to the success of the Social Science Research Network as evidence of the intense competition the reviews face. The SSRN is a free, searchable database that enables scholars in law, economics, and other fields to upload their work for discussion in advance of publication. These days, quite often a law professor will read, criticize, and even cite drafts of an article posted on SSRN before it appears in final form in a law review. The result is that law reviews are, in the minds of some, beginning to feel like yesterday's news.

The debate about law reviews isn't simply academic. Rather, the issue puts into question the role of what professors should do when they're not teaching. "Legal scholarship is at a crossroads," says Ethan Lieb, a young professor aiming for tenure at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. "The question we're asking is: Is our job to advance knowledge through contributions to academic journals, or is it to contribute to the public conversation about law?"

In Professor Lieb's mind, the answer is both. He says he'll continue to write for the law reviews and for a larger lay audience, through magazines and Web sites. Though he says he doesn't "expect a large readership in the law reviews," he believes his scholarship there ensures that his popular writing has heft behind it, and he isn't yet ready to leave behind the serious academic work of the law reviews.

Rosa Brooks, though, isn't convinced. In place of tenure-length law review work, she's now going to devote her efforts to a book about the use of torture in the post-9/11 world, with the hope of reaching as broad an audience is possible. She'll also continue to write her new Los Angeles Times column and contribute to the LawCulture blog. But Ms. Brooks does have one other small project on the horizon: a short piece about executive power for the Yale Law Journal Pocket Part, due out in March.