This afternoon, a group of sixteen law journals - including the lead law reviews at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Chicago, William and Mary, BU and Minnesota, as well as eight secondaries at Harvard and a secondary at Yale - issued a new policy guaranteeing that all publication offers would be open at least seven days. The statement is here.
The California Law Review promptly issued its own statement (via email to me, but without a link) supporting the goals of this new policy, arguing that it already offers five to seven day windows to most authors, and retaining a "flexible" policy which allows for shorter deadlines.
I'm not sure what motivated this move but the editors of superelite journals are probably hoping for a bit of breathing room during article review. By collectively agreeing to this move, the Stanford, Yale, Harvard, and Chicago Law Reviews (or Journals, as the case may be) choose to battle for the most desired articles based on editorial quality, brand name, or other factors rather than speed of review. Now, HLR editors can take a leisurely few days to decide whether to counter-offer the University of Chicago Law Review. Of course, Columbia, NYU, Michigan, et al may still make exploding offers - so it won't reduce the pressure on HLR all that much.
It's not going to change the world as much for the secondaries, BULR, MLR, or WMLR - but it is a nice opportunity for these journals to share the podium. And we'll all be watching to see if it causes policy changes among a broader group of journals. I wonder if this will actually motivate non-elite journals to reduce their offers to seven days, arguing that a seven day offer is now the gold standard.
For all of that, I suspect the importance of this announcement pales in comparison to this one.
My initial reaction to this was that this was an attempt to create a "gold standard" because these top ranked journals might be feeling that their submission pool (on expedite) was being thinned by exploding offers at journals ranked just below them.
Posted by: Scott Boone | April 20, 2011 at 01:11 PM