Student selection (US) versus peer review (UK).

Over at MoneyLaw, there is a post about a recent article evaluating (U.S.) law reviews and their relationship to Law School Rankings.

In a brief piece in the Connecticut Law Review, “Law [Review]’s Empire: The Assessment of Law Reviews and Trends in Legal Scholarship,”–which is part of a symposium that features Ronen Perry and my work on the relationship between law school rankings and law review citations–I talk about some recent trends in law review publishing. I think there are several trends that are positive for legal scholarship, including increasing peer review journals and faculty involvement. Faculty seem to be increasingly involved in selection of articles, which I think is positive because my sense is that students have a difficult time assessing the quality of scholarship.

This is one of the key differences between US and UK academia. In the UK, law journals are all (AFAIK) peer review based, though some articles (such as case comments or analysis pieces) in a given issue may not be. Student involvement is much more limited. I think that our journal, SCRIPT-ed, is a bit rare in how much it is run by students, though certainly it is not a ’student journal’.

The students in the case of SCRIPT-ed are almost all exclusively LLM and PhD students, with the board consisting of various academics within and outwith the university. Unlike when I was at the Texas Intellectual Property Law Journal, the students and other members of the board don’t review the articles for content. We have to go out and beg ask for relevant academics to perform a peer review of the articles.

Journals in the UK, at the student level, don’t perform the same function as they do in the US. Back in the states, being on a journal was seen as very important, especially in relation to landing a BIGLAW job post-graduation. There is a definite heirarchy within a school and between schools as to which ones are more well-respected.

Here in the UK, students generally aren’t involved on journals, and there isn’t a big push that they are crucial career-wise: hence the lack of student interest. Having fewer students makes the grunt work of putting out a journal, copy-editing and such, much more difficult as there are less people to spread out the work. When this work is unpaid, it can be very difficult to expect people to donate large portions of their time. The end result is, of course, that in many journals the copy-editing and layout is done by people who get paid to do it.

I think it will be interesting to see how US law journals evolve in this respect — if the involvement of students devolves into only doing copy-editing and layout, will law firms still be as interested in the students who worked on journals? Will students want to be a part of a journal when all they can expect is editing work?

This entry was posted Tuesday, March 6th, 2007 at 4:39 am and is filed under legal writing nerd. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.