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Academic

: The Faculty Lounge

Brian Leiter's Poll on Academic Presses

By propertyprof

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Brian Leiter's recent poll about views on academic presses that publish in law is finished. While I'm usually (in fact up to this poll, always) suspicious of internet polls, this one is useful for a couple of reasons. First, hey, it's on academic presses, so there aren't going to be a lot of people voting for political reasons. Second, I think the audience who voted are likely to be pretty knowledgeable on this narrow topic.

I agree with Brian Leiter that the list is about as one would expect. I was just a little surprised by some of the results. You may recall that Leiter's previously identified six key university presses in law: in alphabetical order--Cambridge U Press, Harvard U Press, Oxford U Press, Princeton University Press, University of Chicago Press, and Yale U Press. He added that he might also include University of California Press in that distinguished list. So I was a little surprised to see California as far down the list as it was (number 9). Also, as Leiter points out, there are some anomalies. The University of North Carolina Press is one of the very finest destinations for works on United States history. Their legal history series (list of titles here) has published some of the finest works ever written in American legal history; it's absurdly difficult to get into that series. UNC Press doesn't have much, if any, presence in other areas of law, however. So the overall ranking does not reflect the quality and desirability of the press in legal history--or of UNC for American history more generally (this is obvious, but worth stating).

I think we're seeing some important trends in this business. Law titles seem to sell well, so I think that presses are trying to increase their law presence. That may mean (oddly, given how it's increasingly difficult to get a contract in other fields), that it's getting easier to get contracts with presses these days. I'm not sure how long that trend will last. I listed this as one trend we're seeing in the legal academy here.

One final note on this: the poll did not include trade presses (obviously, since the poll was about the best academic presses in law). Yet, trade presses have produced some of the greatest legal scholarship. To take three examples that spring to mind immediately: Random House published Ian Ayers' Super Crunchers and Randall Kennedy's Interracial Intimacies; W.W. Norton published Victoria Nourse's beautifully written book on Skinner v. Oklahoma. (Got to talk about Nourse at some point down the road--this is fabulous history.) I think a lot of legal academics, if given the choice, would rather go with Random House, Norton, Knopf, or Penguin than any university press. However, I may be wrong. I'd be interested in hearing Leiter's thoughts and those of his readership. Leiter's list also left off a couple of what I would think were the usual suspects in the academic press realm: Duke University Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, University of Pennsylvania Press, and (as Leiter had noted already) MIT Press.

At some point we should think about correcting for the number of titles published by each press as well. HUP, OUP, and CUP have long law lists--streching back in OUP's case to Blackstone's Commentaries (no, I don't mean the modern edition published by the University of Chicago Press--with fabulous introductions, by the way). YUP's law list is much shorter, but is very distinguished.

I have some other thoughts on shopping a manuscript to a university press here.

Alfred Brophy

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on April 06, 2009 at 11:11:01 (boomark / email).

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