Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Law review submissions: too cheap?

It has always been the custom to submit papers to multiple law reviews, but the new ExpressO system makes it so easy that some journals are no longer accepting papers from it. Dan Filler at the Faculty Lounge write: Is Now the Moment to Re-jigger the Law Review Submission Process?

"As I noted here, the University of Chicago Law Review and California Law Review are no longer accepting submissions from ExpressO.  They now accept articles submitted for five dollars a pop via Scholastica.  The Stanford Law Review and Yale Law Journal only accept pieces submitted through their proprietary submission systems.  The anachronistic law review publication system has always been problematic - both because law students with limited knowledge make the big decisions and because, given multiple submissions and an expedite bid system, those student editors are asked to read vastlymore articles than they are ever going to have a shot at publishing. (Of course the two are related; you could never find enough faculty volunteers to referee one article seventy-five times per submission season.  And efforts to create a referee bank - like this - have had limited success.)
I strongly suspect that the volume generated by the low-cost convenience of ExpressO might literally be breaking this camel's back. If ever there was a time to get journals on board for some sort of rationalization, it might be now.  "

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