Stats Of The Week: Law Review Sticker Shock
The high cost of producing content nobody reads.
Just about everyone — from Chief Justice Roberts to the angry, scatologically obsessed dude behind Third Tier Reality — loves to ridicule “legal scholarship” for being generally irrelevant and unread. Comes now a new paper from Professors Jeffrey Harrison and Amy Mashburn of the University of Florida Levin College of Law, Citations, Justifications, and the Troubled State of Legal Scholarship: An Empirical Study, which seeks to quantify the actual cost of all this academic navel-gazing. Their estimates boil down to the following: law professors produce approximately 8,000 articles annually at an aggregate cost of about $240,000,000 — or, roughly $30,000 per article.
As Professor Harrison points out on his blog, if the average law student graduates with about $140,000 in debt, that is the equivalent cost of about 4.5 law review articles. (At least of two of which, of course, will never be cited in another article or in a judicial decision.)
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