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Legal Commentary

: Prawfs

Some more blather about "best journals"

By Dan Markel, Ethan Leib, Rick Garnett, Matt Bodie, Paul Horwitz , Steve Vladeck, and Orly Lobel

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The other day Brian Leiter trotted out his new favorite toy (condorcet-compatible voting tools) to do a ranking of the "best law journals." Brian editorialized: "is there really any legal academic who thinks the quality of articles in, say, the Harvard Law Review is really higher than the quality of articles inJournal of Legal Studies or Oxford Journal of Legal Studies or almost any of the faculty-edited journals? I find that quite hard to believe, but I am open to being persuaded otherwise." There's a pretty interesting comment thread to this question-- interesting if you're a dork like most of this blog's readership.

Anyway, my sense is that even if the overall quality of articles in OJLS (which I have seen cited only a few times in my area--I think a piece by Paul Robinson and John Darley is the only one that comes to mind) or JLS (admittedly, a great journal) were higher than HLR or YLJ, it would be hard to say that they are necessarily the best journals to publish in for academics in American law schools. The quality of the articles is only one valuable metric to judge. But visibility and accessibility are important too--a point conceded by some (including Brian) in the comments. Indeed, for a good while, I don't think these journals were on Westlaw (which is the primary though not exclusive research tool I use), which makes citation more difficult.

Moreover, there is an important submission problem associated with the question that I don't think was addressed in the comments to Brian's thread, but which was highlighted to me by a certain FOP named Zoom. Zoom asks: what peer-reviewed journals publish articles in the standard law review format (footnotes instead of parentheticaly references)? I think the answer is not many, which if true tends to support the view [Markel] made on the Leiter thread that there are different streams of people who write for the two different sets of journals. If you're a philosopher, and your preferred publication sequence goes something like Top Philo journal, JLS, middle tier Philo journal, JLA, then of course you write it with the parenthetical reference style. But if your preference is JLS, HLR, YLJ, JLA, then you skip JLS b/c it's a pain in the ass to write two different articles based on citation formats.

Update: A couple things I forgot to mention. I don't intend to ~~shill for~~ tout the student law reviews, but the talk that peer reviewed journals solve the "network" effects by being blind seems naive. I've been a peer reviewer for pieces that are allegedly blind, but b/c of ssrn and just being up on what people are working on, it's not blind. And I've also been the beneficiary of comments (again, allegedly blind) whose authorship is relatively easy to discern. The latter is less problematic than the former because the former situation has the reviewer still get to perform favors for friends (or remove opportunities for antagonists!) in relatively small areas of academic writing. Moreover, there are some faculty edited journals that are not strictly speaking going through blind peer-review. They're faculty edited in the sense that faculty choose the articles. That allows for both cronyism as well as nimbleness in a tight market. That's not to say there aren't journals with better practices and better articles, but we have to be careful about generalizing too broadly about the benefits of one "system" over another.

Full post as published by Prawfs on March 17, 2009 (boomark / email).