Adam recently posted his laments about the state of law reviews, which has been an issue only since the 1930s. I have a different theoretical lens that fills a gap in the literature that, at first blush, seems counterintuitive, and for the first time in the history of civilization fills an unexplored niche. I have now run out of law-review clichés (but invite commenters to list their favorites). 

The Washington Free Beacon story about the publication practices at the Harvard Law Review moves me not at all. If web sites can be "rags," the Beacon is an egregious one. As I write this post, the main headline reads, "Trump Delivers Victory in 12-Day War: Thank You, Mr. President, for Your Attention to This Matter." I put no reliance on a document review from any organization with such a thin connection to reality and committed obeisance to a regime that itself treats reality as an obstacle to overcome. Maybe somebody with more time will dig through the thousands of pages of documents the Beacon made available. As far as I know, no one has questioned their authenticity although it would be fair to wonder whether the Beacon has curated the documents it made available.

Still, Adam is not wrong, and he raises a good question. What good are law reviews in a world of widely available online sources where authors can quickly connect with audiences (such as the blog post you are reading)? Do law reviews now cause more harm than good?

In law-school, I was editor-in-chief of the University of Illinois Law Review. It was an amazing educational experience. We made lots of mistakes. Our photos would have appeared on the web page for Dunning-Kruger Effect if there had been web pages. That is an important point because technology's role has not received the attention it deserves in the law-review story. This was the 1980s, and everything was done on paper. There was a metal bookcase stuffed full of manuscripts that constantly threated to topple and crush the editor working beneath it. We received several hundred manuscripts over the course of the year and thought that was too many. We did our editing by hand.

The word-processing revolution lowered the barrier not only for authors to write a manuscript but also for law reviews in prepare them for publication. As a young academic in the 1990s, I witnessed the proliferation of specialty journals which could soak up the added number of new articles professors were now churning out. Law schools, whether through peer pressure or institutional imperatives, ratcheted up expectations about what how many articles a "productive" law professor would produce. Of course, the technological and concomitant institutional changes have only accelerated. At one time, a law school fellowship/VAP was the time to develop a scholarly portfolio before going on the teaching market. Now, the norm is that people applying for these fellowships already must have a publication record. The Georgetown Law Journal says it receives over 2,000 submissions per year, a number at which it is not humanly possible that each submission is receiving careful consideration.

We have too many law review articles. Too many articles make broad claims. Too many reflect the time pressures to produce. Too many are disengaged from relevant conversations in the judicial, practice, and policy worlds. Too many are just about the author's normative take on an issue of the day. Last week, I read an article with a localized study that was brilliant with revelatory results. At the same time as it acknowledged limitations, it made broad recommendations for national reforms and failed to consider counter-explanations for its results. I fault the author not one bit because, if the paper had done those things, it would have found a home only in a "mere" peer-reviewed journal rather than the fancy law review expected of this young scholar. If we are being honest, we all can find other examples, and if we are being brutally honest perhaps even point to examples in our own writing.

Adam proposes a direct-to-reader model where authors post legal scholarship directly to a web site. A less generous co-blogger than me might snarkily say that Adam just invented Substack. I think such a model only exacerbates the problems. There would be more hastily prepared articles. The articles with the biggest claims would attract the attention. 

Where I especially depart from Adam is the rejection of peer review in law journals. A commenter noted it works quite well in non-U.S. settings. Adam responds it is difficult to peer review the sorts of normative claims replete in U.S. law journals. If an article's main contribution is the normative claim, do we really need it? There are places for bloviating, such as this blog post. Peer-reviewed journals welcome recommendations built on the evidence in the article, but they also tend to be tough on whether the evidence is correct. 

All this debate is academic, in several senses of the word. Institutional imperatives make change unlikely. The legal academy as a whole would need to act, and there is no obvious candidate to be the first mover and solve the collective action problem. The other problem, as many have noted, is that peer review takes resources. The American Bankruptcy Law Journal has moved completely online, somewhat along Adam's model, and it retains peer review. That journal relies on the goodwill of the bankruptcy judges who run it. There is no chance that U.S. law schools will make available the faculty time and resources to enable a peer-review system for U.S. legal journals. The system will just need to continue to be the inexhaustible resource it is for complaints about how it could be so much better.