What's the mission of the law reviews?
Michael Carroll, a member of the Creative Commons board, was here at Cardozo today talking to a group of law review editors from all over the country. He began by reminding the students that the idea behind student-edited law reviews was (at least originally) the dissemination of legal knowledge. The room was quiet — they were all paying attention.
He said that if the editors had a choice between increasing that dissemination (by, for example, making pdfs of articles available online) and making money for their schools (by, for example, reaping royalties from Westlaw and LEXIS, and getting paid for subscriptions), they should choose dissemination.
But he also pointed out that that's probably a false choice — Westlaw and LEXIS aren't going away any time soon, and there is an audience for hardcopy subscriptions that isn't going away either.
Michael argued very persuasively that there are large audiences that don't have access to Westlaw and LEXIS but will find articles online and cite them: researchers who bump into things online serendipitously, researchers from other disciplines, underfunded researchers, and researchers from other countries. He urged the editors to make sure that the authors they publish have the rights to make their articles available online.
Michael pointed the editors to Creative Commons's ScienceCommons project, which aims to widen open access to factual data. He noted repeatedly that other disciplines are very far ahead of the legal academic field in their efforts to open access to information. And he praised the Duke Law Journal for having a long history of putting articles online.
Duke's editor pointed out that law professors with offers from his journal who profess to have a deep commitment to open access will publish articles with journals that are higher in the pecking order but don't put their articles online. So the profession needs to support the idea that open access is important.
For me, the web changes the role of law journals. Selection by a law journal can indicate quality, and editing assistance from good students is often very helpful. But the entire process is slow, laden with tradition, and strangely out of step with the actual practice of law.
Peer-reviewed journals, with swift online posting, would make much more sense. But that would mean that law professors would have to do a lot more work. Some professors, like Michael, would rise to the occasion.
It was an inspiring talk. I hope and expect that every student in the room took it to heart and will take its lessons home. But I'm not sure that the current system of innumerable student-reviewed law journals is sustainable.
[addition — Don't miss the effort here to help push access to law review content. Thanks to Michael Froomkin for the pointer.]
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