This contrasts with law students. They have never even written a demand letter in anger. They have never suffered. They cannot even relate to the troubled parties mocked in the articles.

That sound OK to you?

That Dean at Harvard Law, the Devil, what’s his name? He came up with the idea. “Why not get the students to do this work? I can spend more time with my good friend, Johnny Walker.”

Student run law reviews. Brilliant idea from the mind of an alcoholic.

And even if you can get smaller productive schools to expand the issues, the pragmatic point is that productive prawfs with clout and high placement records (or those who aspire to join them) will oppose the switch. I’m not saying the normative vision is inherently bad; I’m saying it’s likely to be outside the feasible choice set.

Also, the smaller schools with productive faculties can increase the number of students working on their law journals, and hire some “professionals” as editors. Most law schools have very bright fairly recent graduates who would love part time editing work they could do out of their homes as they raised their children.

And if publishing becomes that automatic, what does that do to the respect for legal scholarship as an academic discipline, which already is looked down upon by other fields because of the student-run, non-peer-reveiwed nature of journals.

On the down side, however, this would undercut a way that faculty members have at less “prestigious” schools to get their work noticed. Placement is a silly proxy for the quality of a scholarly work, but at the same time, when faculty members at less well known schools “place highly” their work gets noticed. Presuming that good scholarship will rise to the top without the ‘placement effect’ may be overly optimistic.

The other potential downside — maybe not all of the things we do to make scholarship palatable to student editors and secure higher placement are all bad. Maybe guaranteed (or near-guaranteed) publication in home journals (given the lack of competition, since no one else could submit piece?) would lead some faculty members to submit sloppy, poorly thought out work. Sure, that work gets published now, but it suffers a “placement penalty”. I would add that maybe legal scholars have a responsibility to write work that has _some_ application (or at least accessibility) to judges and members of the bar. Perhaps student editors serve as a good proxy for an audience many in legal academia would prefer to ignore.

One final possible downside — what would happen to job candidates? Where would they publish? If practicing lawyers couldn’t place pieces, would faculty recruiting go back to the old days where law school / undergrad prestige was all that mattered, and performance could not be measured? Would this create a further incentive for would-be law profs to sign on to fellowships at “prestige” schools (for journal publication benefits), even if those fellowships might not be the best use of a year?

Sorry I missed that you brought up the SSRN idea already but I agree.

Still don’t think I’ve heard a good argument for why law school folks, virtually alone in the academy, can’t spend time refereeing like everyone else on campus (I’m sitting on 4 reports [2 econ, 1 l&e, 1 sociology] to be submitted as we speak). If the worry is that peer review enforces too much inertia in scholarship, isn’t that offset now by the wide availability of working papers?

What about the electronic question? That seems to address the number of issues question. In addition, if law professors were more responsible for their cites (as we required on Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities and most other academic disciplines do so too), the strain on students would go down. Of course the law review experience may diminish but finding more cite checkers to increase law review is possible. Now I am not sure what would happen to specialty journals.