The Yale Law Journal, following the lead of the California Law Review, now has a Diversity Editor.
Posts Tagged ‘law schools’
More reactions to “Abolish the Law Reviews!”
My Atlantic piece touched off a lot of discussion, much of it quite constructive, of where law reviews fall short and how best to fix or replace them. Unless you’ve caught up with it already, you’ll want to check out Friday’s post rounding up more than a dozen reactions (and updated a couple of times over the weekend to include more content). On Monday, along with new reactions at legal blogs, the piece took off on Twitter as well.
Joe Hodnicki, Law Librarian Blog:
… eventually, reader expectations will push the long-form law article into the 21st century of e-publishing.
In the process one can only hope that law journals and enhanced regularly updated serial law eBooks will also eliminate the print era version of date-stamping by ceasing publication of “issues” for journals and, for serial eBooks, scheduled “supplements” or “editions.” As soon as the text has completed the editorial process, just e-publish the damn thing immediately.
Old publishing habits die hard, but it is time to create new ones by eliminating print era legacies.
Mark Giangrande, also of Law Librarian Blog, by email, following up on our previous excerpt:
One thing not in my Law Librarian Blog post was a quick check on Westlaw to see what quantity of law review cites appeared in Supreme Court opinions in the last term. A quick count showed at least 56. What surprised me was some of the citations went back to the 1960s. I’ve often criticized law reviews for publishing philosophical pieces that tend to show faculty writing to impress their friends and win promotions, little of which contribute to the bench and bar (per CJ Roberts’ point). The Court still uses them, but generally those which actually discuss the law as the law.
The full list of 56 last-term SCOTUS law review cites, of which the most satisfying is probably “Note, Regulation of Comic Books, 68 Harv. L. Rev. 489, 490 (1955),” is too long to be included here, but those interested can drop him a line.
Adam Kusovitsky and colleagues, Pace International Law Review:
Havighurst is correct to point out that law reviews are published in order that they may be written, but that fact should not rouse a sneer or scoff. …Law reviews provide thousands of students an apparatus to develop unrivaled editing, writing and researching skills, which ultimately makes them better attorneys and more effective writers in general.
Meanwhile, Vitruvian Design spies similar signs of sclerosis in humanities and classics journals. There’s even a Reddit thread (hipsterparalegal). And the article has gotten no end of pick-up on Twitter, including Lawyerist, Corby Kummer, Boston Bar (“must reading”), Cleveland-Marshall Dean Craig Boise, and Bryan Cave Library, to name a few. And:
Are law reviews outdated, impractical, and slowly dying? h/t @DUKEpress – bit.ly/NfjI4G
— Harvard Press (@Harvard_Press) July 9, 2012
Abolish law reviews? But what would top 2Ls do all day? theatlantic.com/national/archi…
— Theodore T (@deEscalate) July 9, 2012
Harvard LR has <2000 subs? Makes you wonder about the rest. RT @LawandLit: Abolish the Law Reviews! – The Atlantic j.mp/Ob54Jh
— Colin Lachance (@ColinLachance) July 5, 2012
@NoKromHd @walterolson @overlawyered @TheAtlantic Even that’s questionable, because so few journals restrict themselves to top grades.
— tedfrank (@tedfrank) July 10, 2012
And this rather cruel exchange:
@sfvba What’s a law review? Regards, @pbsenerchia, Esq.
— Philip Senerchia (@pbsenerchia) July 9, 2012
Law schools roundup
- The Chart of Death: “Law School Tuition Over the Last 40 Years” [Orin Kerr summarizing Paul Campos, PDF] Staggering debt projections (often $200K+) for law students, broken down by school (in more than one sense) [Law School Transparency]
- Schools For Misrule dept.: “Some things that are big in the legal academy are considered irrelevant or crackpot by judges” [Yale’s Fred Shapiro via Ann Althouse] But as we’ve noted, the influence in legal academia of Critical Theory and suchlike coteries has waned [Tony Mauro, NLJ] In defense of the faculty lounge [Stephen Carter, Bloomberg]
- “I don’t know why law professors get such large advances for their mystery novels, just like I don’t know why Americans like to name motel chains after numbers.” [Kyle Graham]
- Jim Chen and others review Brian Tamanaha’s new book Failing Law Schools [Paul Caron, TaxProf; earlier including my Liberty and Law symposium entry with Chen and Tamanaha] “After law school deregulation” [Dave Hoffman, ConcurOp] “Five Ways To Mitigate the Crisis In Legal Education” [bring in more practitioner/adjuncts, dump the library requirements; Andrew Trask, Class Strategist]
- Since Prof. Leiter’s views will never prevail in the United States, Rep. Paul Ryan is free to go on speaking all he pleases [SSRN; more on Jeremy Waldron]
- George Will on Elizabeth Warren race-box furor [WaPo, earlier]
- Obsession with law schools’ prestige levels: is there any way out? [William Henderson and Rachel Zahorsky, ABA Journal; Henderson, Legal Whiteboard]
Scheme to seize underwater mortgages by eminent domain
Prof. Bainbridge among others is blowing the whistle. For more, see Ira Stoll, Kevin Funnell, Steven Greenhut and related, Felix Salmon (role of Cornell lawprof Robert Hockett).
Reactions to “Abolish the Law Reviews!”
My Atlantic piece of yesterday is here (earlier Overlawyered item on it here). At Thomson Reuters “Summary Judgments,” Eddie Evans has a great write-up on the piece. Some other reactions:
I think Walter Olson’s basically right. but there are so many obstacles. First mover issues. Revising the tenure process to accept non-traditional scholarship. Inertia. And so on.
Marie Newman (Pace Law School, whose library staff was outstandingly helpful to me when I was researching Schools for Misrule):
Walter Olson, the always provocative legal commentator, has struck again …the article uses the Harvard Law Review to illustrate the plummeting circulation and stunning irrelevance of even the most prestigious of the academic law reviews in the twenty-first century.
But then we’d have to abolish the Bluebook. It won’t stop!
Surprised that the piece made no mention of SSRN.
David Gravett, comments, The Atlantic:
The first clue to a judge that an attorney has absolutely no legal support for his/her argument in a brief is their citation to a law review article.
Andrew Dressel, comments, The Atlantic:
The circulation numbers are simply misleading. The proliferation of online databases such as Westlaw, Lexis, Bloomberg Law and now Google Scholar have made much hard copy legal scholarship and reporting obsolete. I would be willing to bet there are far fewer lawyers ordering hard copies of the Federal Reporter as well. That doesn’t mean the content is obsolete simply the presentation form. But law reviews have adapted and many run very fine websites that print shorter form reactions to the long form pieces in the actual publication.
I disagree with Walter. The law review should not die. It’s already dead. It’s been dead for a while, and merely wanders about like zombies eating the brains of those who are caught in its clumsy clutches.
More links: Above the Law; commenter Erika at Simple Justice (“What would law school be like without the Law Review experience?”).
I think [Olson] is wrong to assume that “talented law profs” seek out short form options to present their ideas because that’s the first best place to be. … I suspect at least some of us hardly desire to go online to do short form writing as such. Rather, it’s more a matter of resignation about where the eyeballs might be and what civilians’ attention levels are. … But writing to get the argument right requires patience and diligence. Opeds don’t reward that. …
The real problem in law scholarship is not where it appears or how long it is, but whether it is lockboxed. To my mind, every piece of legal scholarship produced should be available online either in final draft or penultimate draft.
[No, I’m not against long-form legal scholarship. I do think it’s commonly ill-served by today’s law review format. — W.O.]
E. Donald Elliott (by email):
Why “abolish” them? They are harmless enough and they provide good training to law students. A little like saying we should abolish high school basketball because the teams can’t compete in the NBA.
Mark Giangrande, Law Librarian Blog:
Don’t abolish, adapt…The sidebar to [Olson’s] article features text by Jack Balkin (The Court Affirms Our Social Contract) and Wendy Kaminer (Juvenile Sentencing: Alito’s Misguided Dissent). Those articles would be published some time in the late fall or early winter at best if written in a form appropriate for law review editors. … My biggest problem with law review content is that even when it is presented online it still generally conforms to print. Maybe it’s the Bluebook mentality.
But where would we pub… Right, carry on!
Maybe we need a knockout rule whereby law reviews that don’t get enough court citations fold? Or would this lead to bad cites?
P.S. My Cato colleague Roger Pilon adds, “Except for the Cato Supreme Court Review, of course.” My reply: Like the Chicago-based Journal of Law and Economics and Journal of Legal Studies, the CSCR breaks with the typical law-review format in several ways, most notably by not being student-edited. No wonder it succeeds.
“Abolish the Law Reviews!”
I’ve got a new essay up at The Atlantic, part of the “America the Fixable” series edited by Philip K. Howard. I have a bit of fun at the expense of the Harvard Law Review, raising the question of whether it should be held to lower standards than the Long Island tabloid Newsday, and cite such figures as Richard Posner, Elizabeth Warren, Ross Davies of George Mason, and the bloggers at Volokh Conspiracy and Balkinization.
American lawyers: a disintegrating guild?
Yes, lawyers are organized as a guild, but I’m not convinced that arrangement is disintegrating or on the way to doing so. I explain why in a new piece at Liberty and Law that’s a response to an essay-in-chief by Jim Chen of Louisville Law School arguing that competition and technological advance are fast eroding lawyers’ guild privileges. The other response-essay is by Brian Tamanaha of Washington U. in St. Louis, whose new book Failing Law Schools has been getting widespread acclaim [NLJ, Garnett]
and whose recent essays in the NYT and Daily Beast have stirred widespread discussion. (& Instapundit, Paul Caron/TaxProf, Scott Greenfield).
ADA and law schools: Down with timed exams?
When the topic of testing accommodations comes up in the Disability Law classes he teaches, Sam Bagenstos is struck at the vigor with which his students push back, finding it unfair that so many of their colleagues request and obtain extra time on exams as an accommodation to learning disabilities or other intellectual disabilities, and expressing concern about the danger that some families will be better than others at playing the system. “I believe that the solution is to give all students more time. For this reason, I give take-home exams wherever possible.” Scott Greenfield isn’t satisfied by this answer at all:
…when it comes to being a lawyer, the desirability of providing accommodations is trumped by the ability to fully, competently and ethically serve clients….
Yes, there are things that lawyers do which don’t require speedy processing, but as long as a lawyer is just as entitled to try a case as write a contract, he must be capable of doing both.
More: Paul Horwitz.
Diversity hiring on law school faculties, cont’d
Point of Law has been continuing its discussion of racial preference and diversity hiring at law schools in the wake of the Elizabeth Warren brouhaha. I’ve now concluded my contribution with a second post (first one here). Excerpt from my new post:
…were competing approaches to diversity permitted, newcomers would be more likely to find an institution that suits their own desired experience: some would seek a pledge that advancement would be race- and sex-blind, others an assurance of encountering colleagues from backgrounds very different from their own.
Of course that’s not the world we live in. In our actual world, all law schools must conform to a prescribed format. Accreditation officials will haul up any institution that tries to be race-blind, and HLS will scramble to claim hiring credit for Prof. Warren’s vague family lore of Cherokee ancestry.
Should outsiders care? One reason to care might be if the prevalence of identity politics tends to reinforce the problem (assuming it is a problem) of ideological imbalance in the legal academy. In Schools for Misrule I conclude that it does, though only as one of many contributing factors….
Debate on law school faculty diversity
In the light of the ongoing controversy over Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren’s ill-documented claims of Native American status, Point of Law — the website I launched and ran back when I was at the Manhattan Institute — has begun a featured discussion on the effects on legal academia of the ongoing pressure to hire by race (and sex and several other categories). Following an introduction by James Copland, I’ve kicked off the discussion with an opening post (“Better Scholarship Through Diversity?”). There’s plenty on the subject, of course, in my book Schools for Misrule from last year. Other participants in the discussion will include Hans Bader of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and, most likely disagreeing with us, Gerald Torres of the University of Texas.