Comments on: Don’t Blame the Law Students [redux]: A Reply to Hunter

By: tnadelhoffer

tnadelhoffer — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 13:15:10 +0000

Perhaps you should check out the arguments offered for Philosopher’s Imprint—a new online peer-reviewed open-access philosophy journal run by the library and philosophy department at the University of Michigan—at: http://www.philosophersimprint.org Here is a excerpt from their mission statement which seems especially relevant: “There is a possible future in which academic libraries no longer spend millions of dollars purchasing, binding, housing, and repairing printed journals, because they have assumed the role of publishers, cooperatively disseminating the results of academic research for free, via the Internet. Each library could bear the cost of publishing some of the world’s scholarly output, since it would be spared the cost of buying its own copy of any scholarship published in this way. The results of academic research would then be available without cost to all users of the Internet, including students and teachers in developing countries, as well as members of the general public. These developments would not spell the end of the printed book or the bricks-and-mortar library. On the contrary, academic libraries would finally be able to reverse the steep decline in their rate of acquiring books (which fell 25% from 1986 to 1996), because they would no longer be burdened with the steeply rising cost of journals (which increased 66% in the same period)”

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 21:57:32 +0000

While I agree with many of your points, I just want to point out that it is fairly rare for a law review or journal to be financially independent of the school. Outside of a select group of law reviews, including Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Virginia, and a handful of others, most of which have an independent source of revenue in the Blue Book, most law reviews and journals are completely financially dependent on the school. While they do bring in revenue from subscriptions and online databases, often it is the school that negotiates the contract with Lexis/Westlaw (which may or may not allow for posting on SSRN) and the school which will decide whether to publish online. A couple of points flow from this. First, to the extent that your academic freedom argument is based on financial independence, I think that fight has already been fought and lost at most law schools. Second, while Professor Hunter’s critiques may be valid, many of them should be directly addressed to the schools. My experience is that while students make the editorial decisions, it is often the administration/faculty that sets the policies that are the source of Professor Hunter’s complaints.

By: Amber

Amber — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 20:39:59 +0000

What about student-edited law reviews that are not funded by the law schools with which they are associated? The specialty law journal I edit (and a few of the other specialty journals at Harvard) are not “supported” by the administration. It takes years for a new journal to obtain funding (and some of us prefer to remain independent so we can publish on our own schedule and without external influence on our content). What’s to be the fate of journals such as mine? We get all our money from subscriptions and database royalties. If we put all our content online for free, we’d fold.