Publishing in an Early Issue of the UC Irvine Law Review

Posted by D. Daniel Sokol

For those faculty obsessed with  journal rankings and placements, here is a question for you.  The numbers just came out in a UC Irvine press release about the entering class. 

As the UC Irvine press release notes:

UC Irvine accepted only 110 of a total of 2,741 applicants to fill its 68 first-year positions, for an acceptance rate of 4%. By comparison, Yale Law School at 7%, and Stanford Law School at 9%, are the only other law schools with single-digit acceptance rates, according to the most recent data available from the American Bar Association (2007).

UC Irvine received more than 40 applications for each of its positions in its first class, which is also a first among law schools by a wide margin. The most competitive law schools typically receive around 20 to 30 applications per slot, according to ABA data.

The law school's yield rate, or the percentage of admitted students who choose to attend, is 62%, with 68 students committing to come from 110 who were accepted. This is second only to Harvard Law School, which has a 68% percent yield rate, and Yale, with a 78% rate, according to ABA data.

The law school's high selectivity allowed it to field a class mirroring that of top law schools. The incoming class will have a median grade point average of 3.65 and a median LSAT score of 167. That puts it on par with law schools rated in the top 20 in the nation by U.S. News & World Report.

These numbers are very impressive and I think that going forward, Irvine can sustain something similar even without giving a free ride to each class.

Here is where things get interesting.  As of issue two of the not yet established UC Irvine Law Review (I am assuming that issue one will be a symposium issue with lots of big names), if you are an author, do you accept publication in the UC Irvine Law Review knowing that in 5-10 years time the school (and hence the journal) will be a solid top 20 placement on your CV or do you accept an offer a little lower down in the law journal food chain such as the Illinois Law Review, Wisconsin Law Review, UC Davis Law Review, UC Hastings Law Review, or University of Maryland Law Review?

Comments

[aspirelawprof]

Hmmmm, I'd take an offer from any of the journals you named before UC-Irvine. You don't accept publication "knowing" it will be a solid top 20 placement because you *don't* know UC-Irvine will be a top 20 school.

That said, some of this probably depends on where you are in the academic food chain. If you are aspiring or untenured, you probably take one of the other offers because you don't know how UC Irvine will end up being considered, but at least in the interim, you assume people will not see it as competitive of a placement as the journals you mentioned. If you are already tenured, why not roll the dice since you're not as deeply emersed in these types of proxy-games?

[AB]

I don't think UCI plans to continue perpetually to offer free tuition, so its application volume is likely to decrease, and correspondingly its acceptance rate to increase. Not sure why to expect otherwise.