Law Professors, Law Reviews

Why Do Law Professors Write Law Review Articles?

Publish or perish, but is there a point to it?

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confusedNow that I’m finished grading exams (that’s right, finished), I turn my attention to writing yet another law review article.  Did I mention I have written a lot of law review articles?  Some of my articles have even been cited, many by other law professors (or, more precisely, by law students filling in footnotes).

Why do I write law review articles?  Other professors are starting to ask the same question of themselves.  Or more precisely, others are trying to measure who is making a “scholarly impact.”  By scholarly impact, they typically mean a direct impact measured by some citation count, download count, etc.  The problem with these methods is that if I write an article titled “Build a Better Biz Org for Tomorrow,” it will have more citations than if I write an article titled “Build a Better Water Law for Tomorrow.”  We can adjust for these things, of course, but I’m not sure the point, unless the point is to make sure that your friends cite more of your work (or get more friends).  We don’t want art that appraises in value over time.  Don’t be thinking you’re an artist whose work will be more greatly appreciated decades down the line.  That’s never happened in law, he wrote sarcastically.

This whole quest started with another bad idea.  Publish or perish.  The whole game of academia is to publish articles so that one can get tenure, get promoted, and be on top of the world.  This means publication in student-run law reviews, preferably at the highest U.S. News and World Report ranks.

If we’re lucky, we get cited in judicial opinions (which is good) or appellate briefs (which is meh), or by agencies (not as good as judicial decisions), or in legislative history (we’re still deciding).  Do you see the problem?   It’s one of many.  Are we publishing for publishing’s sake, or are we making the world a better place?

Thus, here come the rankings. We know you are making the world a better place if you have a scholarly impact.  As Brian Leiter put it, “one would expect scholarly impact to be an imperfect measure of scholarly quality.  But an imperfect measure may still be an adequate measure.”  In other words, we have to measure something!

Hence, the law professor searches for meaning in the isolating world of legal scholarship.  We take to the streets to get our message out.  Some write op-eds.  Some write amicus briefs.  Some testify before Congress and look earnest on camera as a (typically male) member of Congress explains things to us about our own field of expertise.

I’ve done all of that.  And I’m not one bit happier.   More importantly, many have pointed out the potential racial and gender biases of scholarly impact measurements.  Just as one example, Nancy Leong’s blog post is an impressive discussion on the topic.  Gasp!  I cited a blog!

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Yes, some of us have blogs.  The smarter of us have blogs that aren’t anonymous so we can tout our own scholarship and get some sliver of credit for all the work it requires.  Law professors utilize social media to float emerging thoughts among peers, promote completed works, or engage in thoughtful discussions with our peers. A recent survey of academics with Twitter accounts demonstrates increasing usage of a medium.  Again, why do we do these things?

To answer these questions, I have teamed up with the Loyola University Chicago School of Law to host a symposium on April 6, 2018, regarding “The Future of Legal Scholarship.”  The list of speakers and the agenda can be found here.  I’m not suggesting scholarship doesn’t have a future, but there’s something wrong with the way we seek to measure, reward, or otherwise recognize scholarship.  That’s what the program is about.

Or, as my grandfather once asked me after I bragged about my first law review article, “That’s nice.  What good will it do?”  Keen on making the world a better place, he would not have found my scholarly impact ranking to be a good answer.  Nor would he have gushed like my grandmother if I said the purpose was to have them all listed in some law porn.  The world (and law’s place in it) is far more important than the Freudian exercise of measuring how large we are in the scholarly universe.

LawProfBlawg is an anonymous professor at a top 100 law school. You can see more of his musings here and on Twitter. Email him at lawprofblawg@gmail.com.

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