Well, there's discussion every now and then about changes in the Michigan Law Review's annual issue on book reviews. Seems pretty clear to me that the MLR's book review issue isn't as good for legal history as it used to be. Only one legal history book reviewed this past year? Sure, it's an important book (Austin Allen's Dred Scott) and a mighty fine review. But things used to be better. There were five legal history books reviewed in its 2002 book review issue, for instance and four in 1999, to take two years more or less at random. And just for comparison's sake, Law and History Review reviews in the neighborhood of fifty books per year (though the reviews are short, usually about 800 words). Even that does not allow LHR to review every important book in legal history. There just is not enough space and the field is too broad and growing too quickly to permit that.
Michigan Law Review, of course, never made an attempt to be comprehensive or to review even the best works in legal history. The book review editor in me is always sympathetic to others who have to make difficult choices about what very small number of books to give attention to. Just as I've been looking back at those annual May book review issues of the MLR, it occurs to me that you could have some fun looking at what's been reviewed and by whom over the years. Even the classifications of kinds of books (such as "Reconstructing Liberalism" in 1999) would make for some fun speculation. Alas, that shall have to wait for another post.
What follows in this paragraph relates to my theory of reviewing rather than the choices MLR has made. You can very easily make a case for reviewing books that aren't getting attention elsewhere--even if they're not as good books you're skipping over. Then you may want to review a book precisely because it seems deeply flawed; in fact, that may be precisely the reason to give the book attention. Of course, most books are given the preciously small space available for reviews because they're important and their arguments deserve attention, evaluation, and perhaps response.
Still, I wonder if there's a larger trend at work here? Are book review essays going out of style?
One mighty rough gauge of what's happening in book reviews comes from the Index to Legal Periodicals, which has a separate index for book reviews. Dan Filler and I were talking about which law reviews are publishing essay reviews these days. I guess one way to get a sense of that is to look in the ILP's book reviews index. That also inspired me to ask a simple question of the ILP: have there been changes in numbers of book reviews over the last decade or so? With apologies to our friends at elsblog.org, I thought I'd make a really rough calculation here, which makes no effort to gauge changes in the number of lengthy essay reviews that have appeared in major reviews over the past decade.
My measure, then, is number of pages devoted to indexes of book reviews in ILP in the most recent volume (2007-08), a few years back (2002-03), and a decade ago (1997-98). The results--again I emphasize these are rough--show an increase. In 1997-98, there were 18 pages in the ILP (though a couple of spot checks suggested that they fit a few more reviews on each page back then), in 2002-03 there were 35 pages, and in 2007-08, there were 33 pages.
There are a couple of things I don't know: have the number of law books increased over that time? How has the number of law journals indexed in ILP increased over that time? How many essay reviews were published in each of those years? But in absolute numbers, it appears more reviews are being published now than were published a decade ago. And to do this sort of thing right (or closer to right) would require looking in the top fifty reviews or so, to get a sense of how they've approached reviews. At one point in the early 2000s, my sense was that the major reviews were publishing fewer reviews. (Michigan's devoting less space to the reviews, at least. In 1999, their book reviews issue was 805 pages long; in 2002 it was 573; and in 2008, it was 327.)
A very interesting discussion. It seems to me that law has a lot more of what, in philosophy, would be called "critical notices", fairly long (20+ pages), pretty substantial discussions of books. These are often useful and sometimes even significant contributions to scholarship. But, they take up a lot of space and also take quite a while to produce. If you don't get much "credit" for them the incentive to do them will be low. Maybe there's room for more shorter book reviews in law reviews or other places? To my mind the best regular philosophy journal for reviews is _Ethics_. It runs, in every issue, 5-15 reviews of 1-4 pages each. It's very useful. Even more useful, and perhaps a model to be considered by some enterprising law school, is the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, an all-on-line, all-review publication that prints 5-8 reviews a week, at least one a week day, in all areas of philosophy. The reviews are usually of very high quality and are done by a nice mix of junior and senior people. It's here: It's edited by Gary Gutting of the Notre Dame philosophy department. It seems to me that something similar could be done for law (and related) books if some school wanted to take the lead on it. It could even be done w/ student help, law-review like.
Posted by: Matt | January 22, 2009 at 03:41 PM
Hmm, my link got stripped somehow. The NDPR is here:
http://ndpr.nd.edu
Posted by: Matt | January 22, 2009 at 03:41 PM
Agreed, Matt. I think there's also some room for regular law reviews to do more of this. Relatively short pieces that actually focus on the book, rather than the typical "essay review"--which I enjoy reading, but which often go rather far afield from the book. Reviews in American History is a nice model along these lines, too.
Posted by: Alfred | January 22, 2009 at 05:51 PM
A pretty active law-related, online book review already exists: The Law and Politics Book Review, published by the Law and Courts Section of APSA at
http://www.bsos.umd.edu/gvpt/lpbr/index.htm
It is pretty broad ranging, but as might be expected is oriented toward legal works with political content.
Posted by: Keith | January 23, 2009 at 01:07 AM