Law Schools

Law Reviews And The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Want to get published in a top 10 law journal? Make sure you’re an alum.

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It’s time once again to take a look at things in the top 10 law review front.  When we last left our T10 flagship journals in 2017, this is what we discovered: The vast majority of authors in the top 10 law reviews for 2017 graduated from top 10 law schools. Of those, Yale accounted for 27 percent and Harvard accounted for 22 percent. No other school came close. NYU accounted for the next highest level, at 6.7 percent, Stanford at 6.3 percent, and University of Chicago at 5.46 percent. Thus, the graduates of five schools accounted for nearly 70 percent of the publications in the top 10 law reviews in 2017.  Being lazy, we took a random sample and discovered that at best the number of women authors in those top 10 journals was about 33 percent.

I had my trusty research assistant do the drill for 2018.  I am saddened to report to you that the news is not better.  Out of the top 10 law journals, 80 percent of the publications in top 10 law reviews for 2018 are written by authors whose alma mater is one of those schools.  This figure doesn’t include S.J.D.s, LL.M.s, Ph.D.s in related programs.  That would make the numbers worse.  If you’re a graduate of a law school of lower rank, don’t get your hopes up.  The remaining 20 percent has a lot of authors from peripheral schools of higher rank or high ranked universities with an interdisciplinary bent.

In 2018, Yale Law School J.D. alums account for 25 percent of all T10 articles published.  Harvard accounts for 19 percent.  I’m sure you’re catching my drift.

Female authors fared slightly better in 2018 than in 2017, but still not great.  Overall, women authored only 36 percent of the articles published in T10 law journals.

You might be wondering about the racial divide in publication.  It is very difficult to make assumptions about race.  So I leave it to wiser people whether there are racial impacts to such institutional determinations of article quality.

I also failed to go through each and every article to see what they are about.  However, perusing the titles makes me think that none of them are about teaching or legal writing.  Maybe on my next run I’ll look to see if I can turn up clinical law professors or legal writing professors to see what degree they have been able to overcome the hierarchical wall.  If past is prologue, they don’t fare well.

What this does suggest is that, unsurprisingly, the hierarchy perpetuates itself.  As the data suggests, there is some modicum of privilege that arises from being an alum of a highly ranked law school.  One might call it classism in academia.  Even if you decide not to call it that, it’s a combination of unsavory things that give rise to hierarchy.

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It might be the case that the top 10 law schools have such a monopoly over legal education that there are few other professors available who are alums from other schools.  It might be the case that professors who are alums of lower ranked schools just don’t bother to submit to the top 10 law reviews.  Or, maybe those professors just don’t write as well those from top 10 law reviews so the prophecy is justifiably self-fulfilling.

Or, it might be the case that the world of legal academia is an anti-intellectual, self-perpetuating hierarchy.

So, what are we doing?  Why do we give some journals a more prized position than others?  Why do we pretend that the rankings are anything other than a self-fulfilling prophecy?  Why would we be anything but outraged that a group of our colleagues are unlikely to place an article in one of these journals not because of how they write, but what they write, from where they write it, and from where the authors came?

I suspect the answer is because we have all, to some degree, bought into the game, taking whatever slices of privilege we can along the way.  Looking down at my bio, it’s not lost on me I subconsciously put “top 100 law school,” apparently so that I would be taken more seriously.   It’s hard to recognize the game is rigged if we keep winning it.

I’ve argued before that this game (and it is a game) is anti-intellectual.  As one law review article put it:  “The anti-intellectual traditionalists tend, I think, to over-value law school rankings such as U.S. News & World Reports’ annual ranking of law schools. They may not like their school’s particular ranking, they may quibble about particular factors used in the rankings, or the weight given to certain factors, but the anti-intellectual traditionalists take comfort in the existence of supposedly objective criteria for evaluating the quality of the school, which may explain why a common complaint is the weight placed on certain ‘subjective factors,’ such as reputation among judges, law professors, etc.”   So be it with law review rankings as well.

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LawProfBlawg is an anonymous professor at a “top 100 law school.” You can see more of his musings here.  He is way funnier on social media, he claims.  Please follow him on Twitter (@lawprofblawg) or Facebook. Email him at lawprofblawg@gmail.com.

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