The following post from my (obscure) sister blog belongs here as well:
Academic Law Reviews and Legal Scholarship in the Age of Cyberspace
It would have been hard to imagine just a decade ago: major U.S.
newspapers are going out of business. (Quixotically enough, I recently
renewed my subscription to hard copies of the
New York Times.) The same fate has not yet befallen U.S. law reviews.
But
most American law reviews are not, and perhaps never were, subject to
normal market forces; most of these student-edited law journals were and
are subsidized by law schools.
Subscriptions to major law reviews
have fallen dramatically in the last couple of decades. Is the demise
of student-edited law reviews at hand?
Well, even if we ignore the
nebulousness of the notion of "demise," it's not yet clear that
Armageddon for law reviews is at hand. This is because law schools have
non-economic reasons for wanting to keep law journals alive.
It
may be true -- though demonstrating this would be tricky -- that most
"major" American student-edited law reviews are kept alive in
significant part because "major" law schools want to maintain some
control over access to the halls of legal academe
and over the kinds of scholarship that secure access to U.S. legal academe. But there are signs that the gatekeeper role of these law reviews is on the wane.
That's probably a good thing.
The
market, she is tricky, fickle, and often downright stupid. But the
market is also often relatively democratic and open to innovation.
In the age of cyberspace budding legal scholars have some serious alternatives to student-edited "major" law reviews.
It
is true that law schools will very probably still use "major" hard-copy
student-edited law reviews as gatekeepers. But cyberspace and other
developments are gradually creating alternatives to "major" law schools
themselves. As California's
Bernard Witkin
demonstrated decades ago, such alternatives always existed. But in the
age of cyberspace the prospects for market-oriented legal scholarship
have grown and multiplied.
&&& I
confess that personal history motivates this post. Decades ago, I swore
not to submit my stuff to "major" American law reviews. I departed from
my populist anti-establishmentarian line generally only when law
journals
invited me to submit a paper. Otherwise I have published
in other venues. I took this anti-establishmentarian tack when, shortly
after graduation, I tried to publish a study of Hegel's theory of the
"duty to die for the state." I submitted my paper to about five "major"
law reviews. They rejected my paper (but, in fairness to them, usually
only by close votes).
I later realized I was literally
ahead of my time: Hegel was not yet in vogue in American law schools.
Had I tried publishing the paper a couple of decades later, I would have
met with success. But by then I had completely repudiated Hegel and I
had little taste for talking about things Hegelian. (The rejected paper
was an excellent piece of work. [I concluded that Hegel's argument for
the alleged duty to die for the state fails.])
This experience led me to swear off law reviews. I instead worked at redoing part of Wigmore's treatise.
Of
course, by swearing off law reviews (for the most part) I figuratively
shot myself in my figurative academic foot. But I don't regret what I
did. I think my scholarship was more interesting as a result. I
discovered, to my pleasure if not entirely to my surprise, that there
are lots of inquisitive, creative, serious, and thoughtful people out
there in the legal profession and in the wider world. Conclusion:
publishing for the "market" and for the "world" has its compensations,
very substantial compensations.
Postscript: Bernard
Witkin's model of legal scholarship is not the model to which I aspire.
But that's another question. My point here is that Witkin succeeded in
doing legal scholarship on his own.
&&&
The dynamic evidence page
Evidence marshaling software
MarshalPlan
It's here: the
law of evidence on Spindle Law. See also
this post and
this post.
