Comments on: Changes in legal publishing

By: dsquared

dsquared — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 13:12:14 +0000

I’m massively troubled by the legal footnoting practice, because it seems to establish a precedent that you don’t need to read or understand something to cite it; just to know that something sort of like your point is mentioned in it. I am assembling a small collection of citations to Richard Roll’s 1984 paper on orange juice futures and will publish it at some point.

By: Bob McGrew

Bob McGrew — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 06:32:47 +0000

One note on whether graduate students are equipped to judge articles: in computer science, it’s fairly common practice to have student reviewers for conferences (which play much the same role in CS that journals do in other fields.) Admittedly, usually it’s third year Ph.D. students and up, but that’s not so far from third year law students. I would be surprised if this practice only occurs in CS. And, by and large, I think it works pretty well.

By: Orin Kerr

Orin Kerr — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 06:02:19 +0000

I agree completely with Micah. The interesting question is, what led to this change in law review policy? Why now? Why not 5 or 10 years ago?

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 04:21:06 +0000

I agree that op. cit is incredibly annoying. But Harvard-style references are better than either law or humanities footnotes.

By: Lee Scoresby

Lee Scoresby — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 20:39:29 +0000

While law review articles do tend to be bloated, we are seeing the opposite problem in international relations. As article lengths get shorter, there is less room to engage in truly novel work. Moreover, in qualitative work you tend to get the worst of both worlds – sketchy theoretical development followed by sketchy case studies.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 19:28:25 +0000

I’ve been reading some (very good) law review articles by Dan Hunter and others, and I was struck by the inordinately long digressions, loads of unnecessary footnotes and so on. He told me the editors demanded this kind of thing, as a substitute for actual quality , which they weren’t well equipped to detect.

By: y81

y81 — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 18:37:47 +0000

Not the main issue here, I know, but I would note, in response to Matt’s comment, that legal footnotes of the “Posner, supra note 14” variety are a heck of a lot more useful than the footnotes frequently found in history and other humanities, which read “Posner, op. cit.” so that you have to read back through all the prior footnotes to find the opus that was previously cited.

By: Anderson

Anderson — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 17:57:38 +0000

Having served on an undistinguished southern law journal, I can attest that we were specifically instructed to make sure that every sentence had at least one footnote. Writing our comments—same rule. Possibly our second-rate status made us even more self-conscious about wanting to appear to have articles no less clotted with footnotes than those in the 1st-tier law journals.

By: Des von Bladet

Des von Bladet — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 17:47:30 +0000

Was there a rumour that John Holbo was studying for the bar exams?

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 17:37:12 +0000

As someone coming to law from a background in reading philosophy articles, I was shocked and dismayed to start reading law review pieces, even ones in legal philosophy. To my mind there was a huge waste of space in nearly everything I’ve read. This is due to a number of factors- a largely superficial literature review, along w/ long strings of foot-notes to whole texts which are not useful to anyone. (Saying ,”see, for example, Rawls, Theory of Justice” just isn’t that useful). The blue-book style of citation is also a problem- it leads to lots and lots of footnotes of a sort that are less useful than they might be (“Rawls, supra note 14, pp. 36” What was cited in note 14? I can’t remember and now must look back if I’m to see.) Allowing parenthetical cites or some other method for this sort of thing would help a lot. Finally, requiring food-notes for bits of common knowlege also needless adds to the length. It’s only a small stretch to talk of notes for claims like, “Things dropped from trees fall to the ground”n31—n31 Newton, Principia Mathematica p. 98. This should just be eliminated. But, this sort of thing is the style the prevails all over, so I suppose it will be hard to get rid of.