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Who Publishes in Top Law Journals and Implications for Consumer Law Scholarship

By Jeff Sovern

One of my goals with this blog has been to raise the profile of consumer law among legal educators.  Consumer protection affects all of us?as the effect of the subprime mortgage meltdown on the broader credit markets has demonstrated yet again?and yet it receives far less attention in the legal academy than other subjects that seemingly are less important (at least in my view).  In that spirit, I posted an entry some time ago wondering why consumer law is not taught at more elite law schools.  More recently, I?ve become curious about the extent to which the top law reviews publish scholarship on consumer protection.

Just in case anyone reading this blog doesn?t already know, publishing in top law reviews is the Holy Grail for many law professors.  Top placements confer prestige, which is likely to translate into offers from better schools, chairs, tenure, and higher salaries, among other things.  At least theoretically, top placements also attract more attention, which means your ideas are likely to have more of an impact. 

So I asked my research assistant to list the articles published in a recent year by the lead law reviews of the top twenty schools, as ranked by U.S. News (I share the objections everyone else has to using the U.S. News rankings, but for this purpose it seemed the least bad way to go).  In a future post, I?ll write about the subjects of those articles.  This post is about the authors of the articles in those law reviews, or more precisely, where their schools ranked according to U.S. News.

 

A few caveats: I have no idea if the year we picked is representative of other years.  Some authors (e.g., judges) were not affiliated with law schools while some articles were co-authored.  With co-authored articles, my research assistant counted both authors only if they were from different tiers while articles co-authored by two professors from the same tier got counted only once.

 

Here are the results: 114 authors were from schools ranked in the top ten; 121 were from schools ranked 11 through 50; 41 were from Tier II schools; 8 were from Tier III schools; and 4 were from Tier IV schools.  To put it another way, more than twice as many authors of articles in the top twenty journals (114) were from top ten schools as were from the bottom three tiers put together (53).

This phenomenon may have many explanations.  Articles by authors at top ten schools may be of better quality; after all, there?s a reason those professors are at top ten schools.  When a professor at X Law School submits a piece to the X Law Review, the students at X Law Review may be reluctant to turn it down even at the expense of better articles written by people at other law schools.  In some cases, the fact that a celebrity law professor holds a particular view may itself make the article noteworthy. Law review editors may use the affiliation of the author as a proxy for the quality of the article, particularly if the article is complex or deals with an area with which the editor is unfamiliar (something that is likely to be true of consumer law at top schools, by the way).  It?s easier for a law review editor to defend publishing an article by a professor at a top school than by a professor at a lower-ranked school.

 

This phenomenon has implications for subjects that are less well-represented at elite schools, such as consumer protection.  Because few professors at elite law schools specialize in consumer protection, we?re likely to see fewer articles in elite law reviews on consumer protection.  That?s unfortunate.

I had understood, of course, that the top law journals published many more articles by scholars at top schools, but I hadn?t realized the odds of winning the law review lottery were that bad for people in the bottom three tiers.  If you?re a professor at a school in the bottom three tiers and you want to publish in a top twenty journal (and who doesn?t?), you might do well to find a co-author at a first tier school. 

Full post as published by CL&P Blog on February 15, 2008 (boomark / email).