Joseph Slater thoughtfully decries the institution of the student-edited law review. While I have stressed before that I think a number of the flaws he mentioned are less acute at Yale than they may be elsewhere, I do agree with Professor Slater's bottom-line: that the legal academy probably ought to give less credence to article placement than it currently does. It is not in fact the case that there is no peer review in legal journal publishing-- there is lots and lots of peer review. It merely happens after publication rather than beforehand.

And in the spirit of disagreement, I do think there are two very good reasons for student-selection in law reviews. First, only cheap student labor makes multiple submissions possible, and only the massively multiple submission system we have ensures speedy submission-to-publication times. For journals that publish infrequently or late, this may be less important, but given that a lot of legal scholarship is written to have an impact on real-word government decision-makers, time is sometimes essential in a way that is less true in some other disciplines. Second, while peer review is, I submit, more easily captured. This may simply be a different ethic in different disciplines, but the institution of the transient, student-edited law review means that it is much harder for a few powerful professors to block out publications that change what they believe to be the nature of proper argument with the discipline. (Multiple submission, mentioned above, is another safeguard). Sure, powerful Professor so-and-so may lean on an Articles Committee to try to get them to reject some piece he hates, but my sense is that that is much harder, at least here, than it would be if the Professors ran the show themselves. (The difference between the people who are published in the Yale Law Journal and the people who are invited to be visiting faculty here is instructive).

Now, these benefits of the student-run law journal may still not justify the costs of its existence, but I do think they are real, important. And I wholeheartedly agree with Professor Slater about 1, the importance of blind review, and 2, that those who wish to evaluate the work of a legal academic probably ought to read that person's work themselves rather than use the opinion of the Yale Articles Committee from 1995 as a proxy.