The argument being that only by publishing these top-tier folk could we lift ourselves out of the 2d tier. I’m not endorsing this reasoning, folks, just passing it on.

So, are there no peer-reviewed, blind-submission law journals? If not, why not? What does that say about the legal academy?

There’s something to that, but on the other hand, you take a middle class kid who’s overcome a tad bit of adversity and put him in an ivy league setting, and he becomes pretty insufferable. Successful people tend to think the system worked. You could take the class out of it.

I have watched the whole process (as a lecturer not concerned with tenure) and it is as petty and ridiculous as anything I have ever seen.

In accounting, the Ph.D.s have done such a good job of restricting the market there is a serious shortage of new profs and some programs will be in danger come time for accreditation (a class taught by an incompetent Ph.D. is automatically rated higher than classes I teach).

I don’t know of a single practicing CPA in the entire country who reads the Accounting Review or who would find anything in it of value. This is the leading journal for accounting profs.

It is worthwhile to pull out “Prof Scam,” written about 15 years ago. Good read.

This is known to the law schools. If students leave even a semester early, the law schools lose out on 17% of tuition income. That’s why they go to great lengths to structure their “requirements” to prevent as many students as possible from leaving early. E.g., requiring an arbitrary number of credits high enough to force students into a sixth semester. They might offer a very important or popular class only in the Spring semester, every other year, e.g., Environmental Law or Bankruptcy. Some important subjects are broken up into three or more courses (Intellectual property: Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights, or the UCC subject courses), some of which may require completion of another, or which are not offered every year. Many firms want to know class rank, and of course, a class rank can’t be determined until the whole class graduates. You can’t be a senior editor of Law Journal if you leave a semester early.

Hiring firms like the three year system because it lets them audition prospective associates for the summer after the 2L year. For students, the third year is a chance to take courses relevant to their probable job after graduation, after they have some exposure to legal work over the 2L summer. It also is a chance to take smaller courses not frequented by the top 5% of students in an effort to pad out GPAs which might have been bloodied in the larger 1L mandatory courses.

I also don’t really understand the point of law reviews. In doing legal research and writing I’ve found them consistently irrelevant. I guess they’re just ivory tower exercises?

Path dependence. The student-run law reviews evolved that way, and it serves everybody’s interest at the top. They are published by students, lending prestige to the editors – what would be considered mindless proofreading drudgery is elevated to high-status “experience”! The student labor is free.

Faculty do not have to spend time reading galleys or peer reviewing the authors. Of course, as others mentioned, this extends turn-around and publication times, leading to the need for multiple simultneous submissions and serious quality control issues.

This also means that practicing attorneys who have acheived some recognition or expertise (not necessarily both) in their field can write articles and get them published in niche journals – and Law Review publications are always impressive on a non-academic’s resume.

In turn, the inexhaustible supply of potential articles (professors have few requirements and can always secure a student research assistant) and eager students (everyone wants to put “Law Review” on their resume) is feeding an ever-growing number of niche journals. Most law schools now have at least three journals, and some have ten or more. This then leads savvy hiring professionals to “rank” the various journals at a single school in an attempt to combat “journal inflation”.

Some, but by no means all, journals are purchased by law school libraries. Nobody except tenured faculty over 60 who can’t use Lexis actually bothers to read the paper editions of the journals. They are uploaded into Lexis-Nexis, making them available to researchers – who, as you find, end up wading through mountains of pedantic uncitable crap in the vain hope that maybe there’s something useful in there

Whether or not anyone actually reads the crap is irrelevant.

I also don’t really understand the point of law reviews. In doing legal research and writing I’ve found them consistently irrelevant. I guess they’re just ivory tower exercises?

Not just in law schools.

A lot of the most successful academics seem to have an undue willingness to accept the discipline uncritically in its established form. (Yes, academics think critically, but not about themselves. And there are internal debates, but within the paradigm).

“Don’t argue with the teacher” isn’t a universal rule, but it’s a pretty good default principle for ambitious young things.

Couldn’t they just toss a coin and throw away all the papers that get tails? This is arbitrary, but it isn’t “unfair”, as only a limited number of papers can be read and everyone gets the same chance of making it to this stage.

1. Law is about subjective values and argument: there isn’t much of an objective standard by which to measure law review papers. This is less true for “law and economics”-type pseudo-mathematical papers.

2. Law student reviewers are not sufficiently informed to make penetrating critical judgements about the arguments. This is ESPECIALLY true for mathematical-statistical papers.

3. Most law review articles are of two types: (a) recent court decisions have said X, and (b) future court decisions should say Y. How do you choose which descriptive or normative article is “best”? Nearly all the descriptive articles will be factually true, but most attorneys and law professors don’t get their descriptive information about the law from journals, they get it from weekly or monthly summaries or cases in local Bar Reports. As for normative articles, well… there’s no shortage of opinions out there.

1. The only thing that differentiates a law school is the student body.

2. Law students (and lawyers) are natural game players.

Conclusion: law schools are abstract signifiers of the quality of the student – not the education. The initial admissions decisions are only mediated by final class rank (and making law review). Everyone understands this. Students, professors, and those who hire them react accordingly. The only real questions are of the “big fish little pond vs. little fish in big pond” variety.

There is also a very strong class bias here. Like the “Anna Karenina Principle” (“Happy families are all alike, unhappy families are each unhappy in their own way…”) the students at the top law schools generally had to have everything turn out right – for which an upper class background helps immensely. In turn, they don’t interact with very many students who have harder luck – and thus fail to realize the degree to which luck and birth have selected them for their positions. This leads them to over-estimate the importance of skill and ability in outcome, both their own and that of their peers. Because this group then goes on to become the next crop of professors and hiring partners, the biases get entrenched. Sad, but true.

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Detailed Discussion:

1. The only thing that differentiates a law school is the student body.

I mean really, law isn’t that tough to teach. There’s two parts of law school: the first year where all the incoming students learn to “think like a lawyer”, i.e., making logical arguments supported by facts and evidence. It’s called “critical thinking” and it’s depressing that so many bright and motivated 22-year-olds can be so bad at it. 1Ls also learn HOW to do legal reseach – how to find and cite the correct cases and how to present effectively their arguments in written form.

First years learn the “core subjects” of the law, in part because every lawyers needs to know about Constitutional Law and Property and Torts and Criminal Law, but also because those subjects are areas that students may already have some familiarity with and where the fine legal distinctions have been carefully hashed out over decades (or centuries!) and so can be taught to beginning students.

The second part, called “the rest of law school” is all elective: it involves taking courses in subjects that interest the student, or which may be necessary for the specific practice area the student wants: intellectual property, securities, business associations, federal regulatory and enivronmental law, etc. But these courses are pretty simple: “Black letter law” and the major or recent cases. Almost ALL of it comes out of the textbooks.

There’s little real effort to teach students HOW to practice law: drafting contracts, getting clients, networking, answering discovery, litigating, lobbying, or negotiating. So it’s not like the quality of the faculty at the school is really gonna affect your education.

What matters is your fellow students: better students mean that classroom and hallway discussions will be more informative and will do a better job of developing reasoning skills.

More importantly, since all law schools grade on similar curves, the only difference between top tier school “A” students and lower tier “A” students is the quality of the curve. It’s the “who did you beat” issue.

2. Law students (and lawyers) are natural game players.

Law students, professors, and recruiters, and the big firms that hire new grads all understand that law schools are just symbols – arbitrary signifiers of percevied quality. So the best students all want to go to the best schools. They all think they’re hot stuff – nobody goes to Harvard planning to get Cs.

And, for the most part, most students who can get in to the best schools can go because of financial aid and the promise of very large post-graduation salaries to pay off loans. That said, the law school admission process is not perfect: many outstanding students don’t go to the best schools – maybe they need to stay closer to home, have families, can’t get aid, didn’t do well as undergrads, or didn’t have the particular mix of grades, LSAT score, activities and leadership for the schools they applied to, etc.

Not really an exception: lower tier schools with high-reputation, very specialized programs within a specific sub-field, i.e., patent law, or complex financial instruments.

Eeek. The last thing academia needs is BushCo—or, for that matter, any single policing organization, whether governmental or private, elected or appointed—deciding which papers are “most important” and which “existing structures” to maintain.

Interestingly, the most successful people I knew in physics grad school were all from public universities.

But otherwise my refereeing is truly anonymous. The editor of one journal I frequently referee for is extremely conscientious about matters of mix, and about getting longer and more helpful comments for rejections when the paper is less senior or from a lower tier school, by the way. This reflects a very particular view of the function of the refereeing process.