Mission Statement of the Independent Law Journal:

The Independent Law Journal (ILJ) is a forum for independent-minded law professors, students, and professionals to publish scholarly articles, including pieces that conflict with current academic mainstream thought. The Journal is committed to free speech, freedom from ideological discrimination, and fostering robust scholarly debate across a wide range of viewpoints. In keeping with this mission, the Journal is overseen by a board of distinguished and ideologically varied legal scholars. It is staffed by independent-minded law students drawn from America’s top law schools and selected for their academic excellence. As a nationwide scholar-led, peer-approved, and student-staffed journal, the Independent Law Journal brings together current and future legal experts to publish groundbreaking ideas. The Journal aims to provide a space for conversation across the ideological spectrum and believes that progress is often made through disagreement and that truth often emerges from debate. 

Paul Horwitz (Alabama), Alternate Headline: Law Scholars Launch Actual, Normal, Non-Silly, Scholarly Journal:

Kudos. Law faculty should take notice and steer their submissions thusward. And hiring and P&T committees, barring the qualitative review they are obliged to undertake, should presumptively view publication in such a journal as a stronger mark of quality than publication in a student-run journal, regardless of the prestige or ostensible selectivity of the latter. …

It's good that the journal doesn't want to be an echo chamber, but perhaps less good that it is committed to "publishing equally from left, right, and center." It should not let the tail wag the dog. For the most part, it should simply evaluate the quality of submissions and publish what is best, while watching the outcomes and running, as it were, diagnostics to make sure that skews in the results are not the result of bias. …

What the editors are proposing is, of course, just a normal scholarly journal, in line with the standards of the academic calling. Other than journals that run only student pieces, all law journals should be faculty-run and involve peer review of anonymous submissions. As legions of academics have pointed out ad nauseam. 

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