Law Commons^™

A Modest Proposal For Expediting Manuscript Selection At Less Prestigious Law Reviews, Joseph S. Miller

Scholarly Works

The matching market in unsolicited manuscripts, submitted to general law reviews, suffers from far too much wasted student effort. This is especially so among the less prestigious law review staffs, which scramble to read submissions they cannot land in the misguided belief they owe authors serious scholarly engagement with the drafts they submit. If they set aside this quaintly artisanal view—an apparent relic of the “Paper Chase” era that ill suits the age of ExpressO and Scholastica—students can process manuscripts far more efficiently. They need only update their manuscript-review systems according to the same market imperatives that drive the professors …

The Open Access Advantage For American Law Reviews, Carol A. Watson, James M. Donovan, Caroline Osborne

Scholarly Works

Open access legal scholarship generates a prolific discussion, but few empirical details have been available to describe the scholarly impact of providing unrestricted access to law review articles. The present project ills this gap with specific findings on what authors and law reviews can expect.

Articles available in open access formats enjoy an advantage in citation by subsequent law review works of 53%. For every two citations an article would otherwise receive, it can expect a third when made freely available on the Internet. This benefit is not uniformly spread through the law school tiers. Higher tier journals experience a …