The Faculty Lounge

Anonymous Articles Editor Blog?!

How, how has this escaped our reading up to now?  I'm most interested in hearing the thoughts of articles editors and here's a way to hear some of them.  Now, whether we agree with them is an entirely separate matter.  Looks like they're ignoring my advice to law journals from propertyprof.  (Thanks for a pointer to this blog from first movers.)

Alfred Brophy

Podgor on Blogs and the Promotion and Tenure Letter

One of the things I enjoy doing (and hope to do some more of in the faculty lounge) is talking about scholarship.  Ellen Podgor's just posted a short essay, "Blogs and the Promotion and Tenure Letter," which appeared in the Washington University Law Review back in 2006.  It is about how much blogs should count in the tenure and promotion process.  (Like everyone else, I have some thoughts on this--which I talk about in an essay on the future of legal scholarship, "Mrs. Lincoln's Lawyer's Cat"--gotta read the essay to understand the title.  I liken bogging to lunch conversations.)

Here is Ellen's abstract:  " Should blogs count as legal scholarship for purposes of tenure? This essay looks at the line between legal scholarship and service. It considers the value of blogging and the role it should play in a person's tenure review." 

Alfred Brophy

A Focus on Quality of Scholarship, Rather than Placement

Continuing on the Madisonian mobblog, here's a story that close followers of thefacultylounge.org have seen me talk about already. ...

Ann Bartow has one solution to the obsessive focus on placement of articles: have faculty publish in their schools’ law journals. Pretty interesting idea–and that’s sort of the way things used to be, where the a review published the work of the school’s faculty and students (and some others, too). Reviews from the 1920s and 1930s had a ton of “home cooking.” Then again, law reviews publish a lot of their faculty’s work today, too!

One thing I’ve been thinking about is the need to focus on the quality of scholarship, rather than its placement. Here are some interesting data points on this score. Last summer a terrific r.a. (Joseph Sherman) looked at the citations to articles that appeared about fifteen years ago in about a dozen leading law journals. We looked at some of the very most prestigious journals (Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Chicago) as well as some of the other elite (Vanderbilt) and some of the other terrific journals (Indiana, Wisconsin, Hastings). The idea was to see how individual articles, rather than journals overall, fared.

Citations to articles varied greatly, even within a journal.  Kathleen Sullivan’s legendary Foreword to the Harvard Law Review was the big winner–and lots of articles in elite journals did really well–some of the most-cited articles in journals published outside the most elite journals did better than the less well-cited articles in the most elite journals, like the Harvard Law Review.

Want a graphic illustration of this? Check out the graph below. It plots citations per article in selected law reviews. Each circle is an article.

While articles in the most elite journals receive more citations on average than the less elite (but still highly regarded) other journals studied, some articles in the less elite journals are more heavily cited than many articles in even the most elite journals. We should be wary of judgments about quality based on place of publication. We should, of course, also be wary of judgments about assessing the quality of scholarship based on number of citations and we should, therefore, continue to evaluate scholarship through close reads of it.

Now, I strenuously argue in favor of reading pieces, rather than substituting one biased gauge of quality (citations) for another biased gauge (placement). I’m merely using the citations to raise the point that placement doesn’t bear a perfect correlation to relative quality. That, anyway, is the kind of law school I’d like to see–where hiring committees rally around a candidate by saying, “she wrote a great article!” rather than “she published in UCLA!”

If you’re interested in the short paper (including which articles were the big winners of citations), it’s available here.

Alfred Brophy

Symposium Articles vs. "Normal" Articles

A fictional professor at a fictional law school comments on a fictional article published by a fictional law review:

"It shouldn't really count as scholarship--it's for a symposium, by the way."

Is this fictional statement valid?  Surely, the work has been published, and the material is out there in the world of Lexis and Westlaw, to be cited by other students, scholars, and practitioners. 

Some of my most reliable articles that I cite quite often are symposia.  Often times, the articles are more interesting and more risky than "normal" articles, and it allows professors to actually give voice to their own thoughts largely unmitigated by student choice as to what is publishable.

Are Law Reviews Guilty of Letterhead Bias?

Unlike the rest of the academic world, legal scholarship is largely published by students. Those 2Ls and 3Ls we teach in our classes are the editors of our articles, the basis of our promotions, and the gatekeepers of placement. Students, as are laypersons, can be very impressed by name recognition, and so are faculty. Prolific writers at the top of their field publish in well-regarded journals and consistently place their articles in top law reviews. A similar pattern happens for faculty, of whatever rank, at highly regarded law schools. Professors at Top 20 law schools publish in Top 20 journals.

An argument can be made that good scholarship, from whatever source/law school will get a good placement. But is this always true, that the cream rises to the top? Could a any good scholar place an article in a Top 20 journal? Or, the better question is, how often has that happened? Are student editors guilty of letterhead bias, or is some scholarship from certain schools just better than others?

Comments, testimonies, and discussion are encouraged.

The Yale Law Journal At Concurring Opinions Goes Archival

This morning I noticed that the Yale Law Journal is using their Concurring Opinions page to highlight a Jill Pryor note from 1988 addressing the buzzing question of what the Natural Born Citizen clause means.   Calvin and I have blogged on previously on this issue, and Calvin highlighted the Pryor note.

I was a regular at  Concurring Opinions when we invited journals to join the blog as part of the Law Review Forum Project.  We expected the law reviews would highlight new material and generate fresh online dialogue.  I don't think we ever contemplated that they would also use the blog (or the Pocket Part) as a place to feature old but relevant archival material.  It strikes me that this is an excellent use of their platform.  So much research gets lost over time, under the avalanche of scholarship prepared and published year after year in the law reviews.   I think it would be great if law reviews dedicated an editor to similar archival work, resurfacing other pieces relevant to current legal conversations.