Legal Commentary

Just a quick post to get a sense of whether the prawfs and law review articles editors out there are finding that the advent of Expresso has led to a huge increase in submissions. My own anecdotal evidence: when I was an editor at HLR around 1998-2000, my recollection is that we received somewhere between 1200-1600 submissions a year. If we published 12-16 articles a year, then that would be a 1% acceptance rate at that particular journal; I'm not sure if we lost any articles to Yale LJ, so the publication and acceptance rates would be close to the same.

Lately, I'm hearing that the numbers of submissions to top law reviews have at least doubled. The ding I got from Stanford not long ago suggested they were getting over 3000 submissions. If that's true, then that makes the likely acceptance rate a fraction of what it was just 8 years ago. One reason could be that in the last 8 years we have witnessed a dramatic improvement in the scholarly cultures of law schools such that more people are writing and more people are submitting more articles. But another reason could be that Expresso effectively makes it costless and easy to bombard law review editors with papers that one might have in an earlier age restricted to a smaller number of law reviews.  I imagine there is some good data to be had. Anyone know if this is true and if so, to what extent?

Feel free to use this thread's comments to ventilate any interesting submission tales from this cycle, which I suspect and hope is still ongoing -- though I've heard nervous chatter that people think the cycle began a few weeks early this year and that volumes are already filling up.