In an old Ethicist column from 2018 at the New York Times, Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU) addressed a reader's question about the practice of asking one's law faculty friends at other schools to forward the "outsider's" paper to the student law review editors at the recipient's home institution. Here's an excerpt from the reader's question:
In recent years, a practice has developed in which authors send their manuscripts to friends on other law faculties and ask them to recommend their paper for publication to the editors of their school’s law journal. Law students understandably feel pressure to defer to the professors who give them grades and who are far more experienced.
I don’t know how common the practice is, though I suspect that many authors who submit to law reviews are unaware of it. On the positive side, the practice means that a professor vets the article. And it is no different from the common practice of using your connections to get ahead. * * *
In short, to the extent law-review placements are thought to be a statement about the quality of the article — a view that, despite what I say above, I find hard to shake in myself — a result of this practice is that placements may send a misleading signal about the article. That has not stopped me from engaging in it once or twice. Did I behave unethically? Is it relevant that students are involved?
Appiah's response doesn't quite address the reader's question (and I myself am not sure if the reader was a sender or a forwarder of the law review article), but here's Appiah's take:
As you’ve made clear, the practice of faculty recommendation puts pressures on law-review editors that may involve the abuse of power, temptations to toady and a host of other unfortunate effects. . . . [S]ome meliorative steps can be taken. Law reviews could adopt an explicit policy that they will not consider articles sent to them via the faculty of their own institution. Indeed, they could simply circulate a letter to their own faculty asking them not to do this.
H/T Leandra Lederman.
Over on Twitter (here), Leandra Lederman (Indiana Maurer) explains her policy of declining any requests to forward colleagues' articles to her home institution's law review, for fear of putting the proverbial "thumb on the scale for a friend," thereby putting uncomfortable pressure on students.
My guess is that practices and views depend on multiple variables, including the relative "rank" of the sender's and receiver's home institutions (and associated issues of perceived prestige or quality) in some cases. It's a tricky issue, for sure. Until reading the thread on Twitter, I hadn't considered the unintended pressure that these sorts of forwards might place on the receiving student editors vis-à-vis the faculty at their school. Again, that may depend on many factors, but the student perspective makes me think about the issue in a new way.
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