LawProfBlawg (Anonymous Professor, Top 100 Law School), Scholastica, Law Reviews, And Gatekeepers Of Academic Prestige:
Once upon a time, professors had to use the U.S. Postal Service to submit articles, cover letters, and resumes to as many journals as they wished. This was a lengthy, inefficient, and costly process. Eventually a digital platform called Express-O came on the market and provided a one-stop mechanism for submitting everything to one web site and then distributed the packet electronically (for a fee) to as many law reviews as the professor wished. Professors and their administrative assistants breathed a sigh of relief. It also made it much easier to flood hundreds of law reviews with submissions with very little effort.
Eventually, law reviews embraced electronic submission as their preferred or exclusive method of submission. The journals’ electronic mailboxes filled up while their physical mailboxes emptied out. For a variety of reasons, over the past 12 or so years, journals began including Scholastica as an additional option, and Express-O went out of business in 2021.
Today some law journals have their own individual submission portals with various idiosyncratic requirements about format, anonymization, abstracts, tables of contents, AI use, etc. Some allow direct submission via email. Most law reviews rely on Scholastica for their exclusive or preferred submission portal. The law reviews then respond to the authors with an eventual acceptance or rejection through the platform and notify Scholastica when they are “open” for submissions and when they are “closed” for the season or academic year. Lucky professors often leverage the first acceptance by asking for a substantial deadline to respond and contacting higher-ranked journals that have not yet responded for an expedited decision before the initial deadline. Scholastica, like Express-O before it, held forth the promise of a single, relatively efficient (but not cheap) method of sending up a draft law review article and accompanying materials to as many journals on the platform at one time, receive one or more acceptances, and publish with the “best” (highest-ranked) journal to make an offer.
That promise is increasingly in jeopardy. Sure, some professors continue to play the game successfully, but it’s a radically smaller group in recent submission cycles. Even famous-named folks are having trouble placing articles in the top 30 law reviews. And worse, the problem of overwhelmed law review editors seems to have trickled down to the law reviews at the lower end of the rankings. In short, many folks have faced more than two article submission seasons this year without any placements.
There are more law review articles than ever before. For any individual article, cost is the only real deterrent to submitting to all journals and law reviews where there is a chance of being accepted (for example, presumably authors don’t submit an environmental law article to a specialty tax journal). Some higher-end journals suggest they are screening over 3,000 articles (while only having a max of 20 slots for those articles). Those are bad odds.
Part of the problem is also AI. I’ve written about law review editor use of AI screens before. Depending on the nature of the backlog, the problem promises to get worse.
What exactly are we law professors getting for our (or our institution’s) money? And how do we cope with a system where we have to hit “submit” without knowing when or even if a journal will ever consider an article on the merits, i.e., actually read it?
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