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08/16/2005: Speaking of Brian Leiter....
he once again highlights why legal "scholarship" is a joke:
In the annals of ill-conceived solicitations from law reviews, the one I received today (a mass mailing to law professors nationwide) from the Fordham Law Review is likely to be added to the list of "what not to do":Now that I'm out of the legal profession, I'm even more astonished that the student-edited law reviews are still in business (I was astonished at it from my first day in law school, when I learned of the practice). In no other "learned" profession would it be thought that mere students without practice experience would be qualified to select and edit articles for publication in the major professional journals. Especially when such authority is exercised over articles by scholars who are currently much more accomplished and distinguished in their fields then the student-editors in question will be for many, many years to come.As you may have heard, a group of law reviews, including Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, Michigan, Stanford, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Yale, recently announced their intention to limit the length of articles. For example, Harvard Law Review will not publish articles longer than 70-75 law review pages "except in extraordinary circumstances."Yes, indeed, that's exactly what the top law reviews were saying: "We don't care about quality or merit, we care only about number of pages." But, thankfully for the verbose and undisciplined, there remains a journal courageous enough to publish unreadable, reinvent-the-wheel tomes posing as articles: the Fordham Law Review! What would we do without it?
The Fordham Law Review...disagrees with this policy. We believe that quality is more important than quantity. Therefore, we will continue to focus only on merit in choosing what articles to accept.
Why is it still the case in the law?
Len on 08.16.05 @ 08:24 AM CST
