Legal Commentary

Now that we?re in the middle of the law faculty hiring season, and so many of you out there are busily and conscientiously trying to gauge the comparative quality of candidates? scholarship, here?s a plea:  don?t treat all law review placements the same.  Until, that is, the day that law reviews implement (and effectively enforce) a double-blind law review selection process (don?t hold your breath).  Double-blind review means that the submitting author does not know the identity of those making the selection decision, and likewise reviewers do not know the identity of the author when deciding on publication offers.

There?s actually been a surprising amount of scholarship on the subject, and it all reaches the same conclusion:  law review publication offers generally aren?t determined by quality, but by various proxies to quality that can be grouped under the general rubric of ?letterhead bias? (such as the professor?s name, the law school at which the professor teaches, or where the professor has previously published).  You?ll find a good, recent piece of this scholarship here (note, the citation is wrong; it actually starts on page 175).  It contains citations to a lot more of the scholarship in this area in case you?re interested.  Now, it may well be that letterhead bias is a roughly accurate barometer of quality, but it is at best only that, and it?s probably worse.  (Particularly compelling is James Lindgren?s reported "nonscientific study" (see here, pg. 610) in which he submitted the identical article on Chicago-Kent and University of Chicago letterhead.  His best offers were from Arizona, versus Penn and Northwestern, respectively.)

So here?s a plea:  when weighing the quality of candidates? law review placements, take into account the law school from which the candidates submitted.  (Says me, writing from a fourth-tier school.)

There seems widespread dissatisfaction with this state of affairs, yet inertia continues to reign.  Which is frustrating because this problem could (easily?) be fixed if only law reviews would adopt double-blind review, as recently advocated by Jonathan Gingerich, A Call for Blind Review: Student Edited Law Reviews and Bias, 59 J. Legal Educ. 269 (2009).  If, say, the Top 20 law reviews got together and jointly adopted double-blind review (similar to the effort to shorten article length), would that be enough for the ethic to spread throughout the whole law review/journal world?  (Note, Yale L.J. purports to already have it, see the first link above.)

Or, is there some other, better alternative to double-blind review?