To ":" or Not to ":"?

As usual, many bloggers - profs and law review editors -  have been commenting on the spring submission window and strategies for article placement, including best times to submit articles.  Each "submission season" we often get a rehash of issues we've discussed in the past, although I still find the discussions useful, particularly feedback from current law review editors.  However, this year I've heard some offline comments that I haven't heard before - or if I had heard them, I hadn't properly registered them.  There seems to be some anecdotal evidence that the ": [subtitle]" format of article titles is going out of style.  I'm really interested in how law reviews became interested in the "[Catchy Title]: [subtitle]" format for article titles in the first place and whether/why it is going out of style.  When I first moved to the United States about 10 years ago, the law review system here was the first system I had ever seen that was so partial to ":"s and subtitles.  It's taken me this long to master them too!  I'll be sad to see their demise...

Comments

[Steven Lubet]

These trends come and go. For awhile, single word titles were in vogue. Then it was questions. Then it was gerund phrases. But the venerable "title:subtitle" is the most durable of them all.

[Gregory McNeal]

I can confirm this rumor as of a few cycles ago, at least for one journal--- An editor on the Northwestern Law Review told me during the Spring cycle of 2008 that they were trying to get away from the title:subtitle format. It didn't affect publication of my piece, but they did request I reword the title which I was happy to do.