Has Environmental Law Made it?

There are many factors that go into where you place your law review article. We all know that quality counts, as does your institution's U.S. News ranking and your own prior publication record. Many have pondered about how to strategize the details as well - what are the best words to include in your title to impress 2Ls, what is the preferred word count (a moving target as well as a variable one), and how flashy should the introduction be, as just a few examples.

Of course, there are some things we can control (details, and to some extent quality and building a solid publication record to improve future placements), and some we cannot (what U.S. News thinks of us - and strategizing that is a topic for a different post). But what about the field you have chosen to research and write about? While arguably in your control - hey, you picked it - for many of us with careers underway, this is a set reality. Not to say we'd want to change it (if you're lucky, you remain fascinated with the subject), but it is our somewhat fixed reality now. We may make small moves around within it, but these varying subtopics tend to fit together under a larger umbrella (for most of us - we aren't all Sunstein). This, of course, raises the importance of how your given field fares in law review selection, and clearly I mean the general law reviews.

If you managed to choose something like Constitutional Law to write about, or are writing about a currently hot topic otherwise, you should do fine in the general law review process. Environmental Law, however, like many other fields seen as "your thing" and not "everybody's thing," has traditionally not made the cut. The vast majority of our articles get placed in the specialty journals for our field (for example, in 2006 Sunstein published a conlaw article in the Yale Law Journal and a Global Warming article in the Pace Environmental Law Review, so even Cass is not immune). But is the tide turning for Environmental Law, and if so, why?

Recently I've noticed more of my colleagues' articles turning up in general law reviews. A quick set of Westlaw searches (limited by time and context, but perhaps a matter worth assigning an RA to more precisely research) suggests there may be such a trend (although the vast majority of our work remains in specialty journals, which are notoriously undervalued). A small handful have even begun to make their way in to the top journals in the country.

If Environmental Law article placement is moving up in the world, why might that be happening? It could be that it is a topic of increasing real-world impact. Or perhaps it is because law review editors are so young, and the young have been raised to fear environmental harms (especially climate change) in a way those of us who hid under our school desks from hypothetical nuclear bombs cannot imagine. These possible reasons do make sense, but I think there is more to it than that. I suspect that it may relate to environmental scholarship becoming both more theoretical and more interdisciplinary. Whatever it is, we may well be mainstreaming, which could have many other fringe benefits for the field.