Law Commons^™

Acknowledgements As A Window Into Legal Academia, Jonathan Tietz, W. Nicholson Price Ii

Articles

Legal scholarship in the United States is an oddity—an institution built on student editorship, a lack of peer review, and a dramatically high proportion of solo authorship. It is often argued that this makes legal scholarship fundamentally different from scholarship in other fields, which is largely peer-reviewed by academics. We use acknowledgments in biographical footnotes from law review articles to probe the nature of legal knowledge co-production and de facto peer review in the legal literature. Using a survey and a textual analysis of about thirty thousand law review articles from 2008 to 2017, we examined the nature of knowledge …

How I Finally Overcame My Apprehension About Peer Review, Beth H. Wilensky

Articles

I’ll admit it: I was afraid to try peer review in my Legal Practice class. I’ve been teaching legal analysis, writing, and research for 17 years. I know all of the benefits of peer review. I’ve read plenty of scholarship about why and how to do it well. I have space in my syllabus to incorporate it into my teaching. But I’ve been reluctant. I worried that students would be averse to sharing their work with a classmate. I worried that the exercise would embarrass students who felt self-conscious about their writing. And I worried that the truly excellent writers …

Computer-Supported Peer Review In A Law School Context, Kevin D. Ashley, Ilya Goldin

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Legal instructors have been urged to incorporate peer reviewing into law school courses as a way to provide students much needed feedback. Peer review can benefit legal education, but only if law school instructors adopt peer review on a large scale, and for that, computer-supported peer review systems are crucial. These web-based systems orchestrate the mechanics of students submitting written assignments on-line and distributing them to other students for anonymous review, making it considerably easier for instructors to manage.

Beyond the problem of orchestrating mechanics, however, a deeper obstacle to widespread acceptance of peer review in legal education is the …

Yesterday Once More: Skeptics, Scribes And The Demise Of Law Reviews, Bernard J. Hibbitts

Articles

This article responds to a series of commentaries on my 1996 Web-posted article Last Writes? Re-assessing the Law Review in the Age of Cyberspace (reprinted in 71 New York University Law Review 615 (1996)) collected in a Special Issue of the Akron Law Review (Volume 30, Number 2, Winter 1996). Last Writes? argued that the development of Internet technology allows and should encourage legal scholars to move away from traditional law review publication - with all of its well-publicized problems - towards a “self-publishing” system in which articles uploaded to the Internet by their scholarly authors could be archived centrally …