Constitutional Law

"Peer review"

Frequently I've seen the claim that articles published in historical or medical journals are somehow more reliable than those in law reviews, since the former are subject to "peer review," i.e., review by other scholars in the field, whereas law reviews are subject to edit by student editors. As the career of Mr. Bellesiles suggests, peer review doesn't prevent little things like wholesale invention of evidence or gross misreading of authorities. I suspect that, unless the peers have a lot of specific expertise in the subject, to where they know the evidence by heart, it's a bit more like "I like his conclusion."

Clayton Cramer has a post, relating to this article in Inside Higher Ed. It relates to a study that involved actually reading published, peer-reviewed articles and comparing them to the sources they cited.

"31 percent of the references in public health journals contained errors, and three percent of these were so severe that the referenced material could not be located.?

?[A]uthors? descriptions of previous studies in public health journals differed from the original copy in 30 percent of references; half of these descriptions were unrelated to the quoting authors? contentions.?

So much for peer review.

Hat tip to Joe Olson...

Full post as published by Of Arms and the Law on July 08, 2008 (boomark / email).