Bounties for Prestigious Law Review Placements

I'm sure we've discussed this before, but a number of schools still retain incentives for faculty to publish in high-ranked law reviews through bounties/rewards e.g. if any faculty place an article in a journal whose school is ranked in the U.S. News Top [10/20/50 etc], they get a grant or stipend for doing so.  I understand that placements are the coin of the realm, but these systems seem strange to me.  If faculty are being productive and their scholarship is impactful, I wonder if pressure or encouragement to publish in certain journals creates incentives in some cases to make scholarship less effective than it might otherwise be.  For example, this year, I've turned to more internationally focused intellectual property work and have published more in international journals than I usually do.  Some of the reason for that focus is that international journals have actually solicited this work, but it's still getting cited and noticed, perhaps more so than it would have in a traditional U.S. law review.

If the argument in favor of publishing in traditional law reviews is that everything is online now anyway, so it doesn't matter where you publish (so why not publish in traditional U.S. law reviews?), I would suggest that is incorrect.  While most U.S. law reviews are available online, many of them are not available free of charge online.  So the audience would be limited to those who have paper subscriptions or can afford LEXIS/Westlaw access.  Of course, the same would be true for journals in other countries and professional journals.  So the argument can easily be turned around to say that everything is equally accessible online (sometimes free of charge, and sometimes for a fee), so why not publish in the place where the article will get the most traction?

And of course the fact that bounties exist for prestigious placements doesn't mean that any professor has to aim for a certain kind of placement for every single article.  And presumably faculty who don't publish in Top [10/20]50] journals but do publish well have other incentives such as professional reputation enhancement and potentially recognition in base salary?

It just seems to me that the express recognition of what "prestigious placement" means can send strange and potentially inaccurate signals to faculty about the definition of good/insightful/impactful scholarship. Thoughts?

 

Comments

[Jack]

Orin,

My sense is that the tenure requirements are essentially voluntary. Yes, perhaps there must be nominal tenure, but based on policies I've seen with no negative ABA action, to the extent that tenure regulates things like pay, teaching loads, course subject matters, and the kids of things that can get you fired (e.g., lack of productivity, failure to be in the office during business hours), it does so based on custom, tradition, and choices by institutions to have pro-faculty policies, not law or ABA or AALS mandates. The for-profits (e.g., Phoenix and Charlotte) go some distance toward giving the institution the kinds of authority that a boss in the business world would have to define successful job performance and impose discipline, including termination, in its absence, but are nonetheless accredited.

[Jacqueline Lipton]

And I should perhaps clarify that in my earlier comment I wasn't contemplating a situation where some schools offer tenure and others don't. As long as there are schools that do offer tenure, it will never be in the institutional interests of other schools to not offer tenure. They obviously wouldn't be able to compete for top faculty. I was making a comment about tenure generally. I was not suggesting that it would ever be in a school's interest to prospectively dismantle tenure while other schools retained it.

[Anon]

Thirty seconds of Googling would reveal that the degree to which tenure is currently required by the ABA is disputed:

http://bestpracticeslegaled.albanylawblogs.org/2010/08/03/aba-current-standards-do-require-tenure-despite-assertions-otherwise/
http://newsandinsight.thomsonreuters.com/Legal/News/2011/11_-_November/ABA_committee_considers_dropping_tenure-policy_requirement/