Alternate Headline: Law Scholars Launch Actual, Normal, Non-Silly, Scholarly Journal

Noted with interest: "a number of law professors from top schools are working together to start a new publication—the Independent Law Journal. All articles published in the Journal will be peer-approved by a faculty board, but student staff will still handle most of the Journal's operations and will collaborate with faculty in initial article selection....[T]he ILJ is...a non-partisan [journal] committed to publishing equally from left, right, and center. Nobody benefits from groupthink, and the Journal will work hard to prevent itself from becoming an echo chamber."

Kudos. Law faculty should take notice and steer their submissions thusward. And hiring and P&T committees, barring the qualitative review they are obliged to undertake, should presumptively view publication in such a journal as a stronger mark of quality than publication in a student-run journal, regardless of the prestige or ostensible selectivity of the latter. A few things to note:

1) I trust that the "from top schools" language is mostly for purposes of identification. It's not a bad thing,of course! But it's also not a necessity as such (nor are all the leading scholars at the top law schools), and a demand for "top law school" professorial involvement shouldn't be the bottleneck that holds up an increase in the number of peer-reviewed professional legal academic journals. 

2) Of course students should handle most of the operations and of course they will, in doing so, pick up the skills that law review in its usual current form is supposed to teach (although its real value to students likes mostly in its proxy function for employers, of course). But I hope the journal will offer further detail about student involvement in "initial article selection." If that means going through the slush pile with some easily applied criteria in hand, it's reasonable. If it means something more, the editors ought to explain further.   

3) One assumes, given its ambition to "foster high-quality publishing and free and robust debate in legal academia," that the ILJ will avoid like the plague some of the bad practices that have taken a foothold among student-run law journals: e.g., "whole person review," mechanical obsessions with "firstness," editor- and volume-specific mission statements or secret selection criteria, anonymity that isn't, peer review processes that consist of an editorial board soliciting and ignoring peer reviews, and so on. 

4) It's good that the journal doesn't want to be an echo chamber, but perhaps less good that it is committed to "publishing equally from left, right, and center." It should not let the tail wag the dog. For the most part, it should simply evaluate the quality of submissions and publish what is best, while watching the outcomes and running, as it were, diagnostics to make sure that skews in the results are not the result of bias. 

5) I would cabin that point a little by suggesting that law review editors, despite our living in an age in which everything is seen as part of a larger database instead of as a tangible, discrete object in itself, ought always to think about the shape of individual issues. They should select and organize the pieces they select for some degree of variety and readability for each issue, complete with what magazine editors call a "front of the book" and a "back of the book." The desire to have actual journal issues that are a pleasure to behold and to read would itself contribute to the desire for greater attention to political and other forms of diversity. That would include subject diversity--more private law, etc. (it goes without saying that there should be more admiralty law pieces)--and diversity of length and format.

6) In line with that, and because of simple need, I hope the editors will make special efforts to solicit, and give extra weight to, short submissions--under 30 pages, say, of the sort that Cass Sunstein has been churning out of late--as well as essays and, especially, book reviews. We always need more book reviews and review essays.  

7) What the editors are proposing is, of course, just a normal scholarly journal, in line with the standards of the academic calling. Other than journals that run only student pieces, all law journals should be faculty-run and involve peer review of anonymous submissions. As legions of academics have pointed out ad nauseam.