Pfander on Looking for Art in the Law Review Article

James E. Pfander, Northwestern School of Law, has published Looking for Art in the Law Review Article at the Harvard Law Blog, September 5, 2025 and as Northwestern Public Law Research Paper No, 25-44. Here is the abstract.

This short essay considers the nature of and market for legal scholarship. Taking a page or two from the book Air Guitar by the critic, Dave Hickey, the essay reflects on how we measure greatness and failure in art and in the art of the law review article. Blame for all seemingly irrelevant asides should be assigned to Arthur Leff, whose work taught us much about greatness. Failure we have all had to work out for ourselves.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Rostron and Levit on Information For Submitting Articles To Law Reviews & Journals @UMKCLaw @levitn

Allen Rostron and Nancy Levit, both of the University of Missouri, Kansas City, School of Law, have published Information for Submitting Articles to Law Reviews & Journals. Here is the abstract. 

 This document contains information about submitting articles to law reviews and journals, including the methods for submitting an article, any special formatting requirements, how to contact them to request an expedited review, and how to contact them to withdraw an article from consideration. It covers 196 law reviews. 

 Download the article from SSRN at the link.

ICYMI: Emerson on An Ode to the Missive-Writer of the Law Review Rejection

ICYMI: Warren Emerson, Savannah Law School, has published An Ode to the Missive-Writer of the Law Review Rejection. Here is the abstract.

Law and rejection go hand in hand. Litigators must explain to their clients why a claim failed and transaction attorneys describe why a deal fell through. Communicating failure has become a trade par excellence in the study of law. This short piece suggests that the rhetorical tradition of the love sonnet may be helpful in unpacking the mechanics of how communicating legal rejections can be improved. Drawing on exhaustive empirical study of the author’s personal law review rejection letter, for which the author has many, this short piece provides a detailed study of human cognitive emotions at the intersection of labor-based rejection.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Rostron and Levit on Submitting Articles to Law Reviews & Journals @UMKCLaw

Allen Rostron and Nancy Levit, both of the University of Missouri, Kansas City, School of Law, have published Information for Submitting Articles to Law Reviews & Journals. Here is the abstract.

This document contains information about submitting articles to law reviews and journals, including the methods for submitting an article, any special formatting requirements, how to contact them to request an expedited review, and how to contact them to withdraw an article from consideration. It covers 203 law reviews.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Davies on Ranking the Olympians Before U.S. News @GB2d

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University Law School, has published Ranking the Olympians Before U.S. News: When Vanity Fair and The Bookman Told Their Readers Who Really Mattered at 21 Green Bag 2d 241 (2018). Here is the abstract.

When were the first law-related rankings published? Answering that question would be like determining when the first baseball game was played. You would have to start by settling fundamental and disputable definitional issues: What is a publication (or what is baseball)? What counts as a ranking (or a game)? And so on. Experts, even those who are most eminently knowledgeable and admirably reasonable, sometimes disagree about such things. Then, if you were to miraculously manage to settle all such matters of meaning, you would have to look everywhere that such a ranking might have been published (or such a game recorded). That is too much. Better to work incrementally – to report ever-earlier sightings as you find them and hope that definitional consensuses grow as unexplored territories shrink. That is the spirit in which I offer this report on two sets of rankings published in the early 20th century.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Kerr on The Law According to the Most-Cited Law Review Articles of All Time @GeorgetownLaw @GB2d

Andrew Jensen Kerr, Georgetown University Law Center, is publishing The Law According to the Most-Cited Law Review Articles of All Time in volume 20 of the Green Bag 2d (August 2017). Here is the abstract.

In this essay I address the perennial question of “What is law?” My data is our canon, as measured by citation counts. I limit my compass to the fifty most-cited articles in the modern Anglo-American tradition. My essay reads as a mosaic, but suggests the continuities in legal inquiry.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Mohr on Ireland and the British Empire, 1916-1937: A Relationship Reflected in Law Journals

Thomas Mohr, Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin, has published Ireland and the British Empire, 1916-1937: A Relationship Reflected in Law Journals as UCD Working Papers in Law, Criminology & Socio-Legal Studies Research Paper No. 04/16. Here is the abstract.

The purpose of this article is to assess the value of law journals as sources for the analysis of modern Irish history. It examines how two periods of obvious political transition in Irish history are reflected in law journals. The article covers the period between 1916 and 1922, which saw the secession most of the island of Ireland from the United Kingdom, and the period between 1922 and 1937, which saw the gradual secession of the Irish Free State from the British Empire. It examines how military conflict, partition and the 1921 Anglo Irish Treaty influenced the content, nature, and editorial policies followed by Irish law journals. Important non-Irish law journals, in particular the Canadian Bar Review and the Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law, are also examined in the context of the constitutional relationship between the Irish Free State and Dominion status. These examples are used to support the conclusion that law journals remain important sources in charting and evaluating political transitions in early twentieth century Ireland.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

LoPucki on Disciplinary Legal Studies, Legal Scholarship, and Legal Academic Hiring

Lynn M. LoPucki, UCLA Law School, is publishing Disciplinary Legal Empiricism in volume 76 of the Maryland Law Review (2017). Here is the abstract.

This Article reports on an empirical study of one hundred and twenty empirical legal studies published in leading, non-peer-reviewed law reviews and in the peer-reviewed Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. The study is the first to compare studies by disciplinary empiricists – defined as Ph.D. holders – with those by non-disciplinary empiricists – defined as J.D. holders who are not also Ph.D. holders. Three differences identified in the study suggest that Ph.D. hiring is on a collision course with the demands of legal educators, the organized bar, and students that the law schools better prepare students for practice. First, disciplinary legal empiricists focus their studies less directly on legal issues and materials. Second, disciplinary legal empiricists are only half as likely as non-disciplinary empiricists to create new datasets. Instead, they analyze existing datasets statistically, conduct experiments, or administer surveys. Because most J.D.-Ph.D.s have no practice experience when they begin teaching and pursue scholarly agendas that do not engage them with lawyers or legal materials, they are unlikely to become sufficiently familiar with the world of legal practice to effectively prepare students for it. Third, Ph.D.s tend to collaborate with other Ph.D.s. That finding is in tension with the claim that hiring small numbers of Ph.D.s who collaborate with the non-Ph.D.s on law faculties can meet the law schools’ need for pervasive empiricism. This Article concludes that Ph.D. hiring will continue to increase across all levels of the law school hierarchy as a share of tenure-track hiring. But the numbers of tenure-track law faculty hired will shrink as the law schools shift resources to hiring full-time, non-tenure track faculty with legal experience.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Schlag on the Law Review Article

Pierre Schlag, University of Colorado Law School, has published The Law Review Article as Legal Studies Research Paper 16-2. Here is the abstract.

This very short piece describes the form, structure and vexations of the law review article qua scholarly artifact. It also contains Professor Max Stein’s latest thoughts as articulated in Schlag's recently published book, “American Absurd”.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

What's Right With Law Reviews

Cass R. Sunstein, Harvard Law School, is publishing In Praise of Law Reviews (And Jargon-Filled, Academic Writing) in the Michigan Law Review. Here is the abstract.

Many people, including many lawyers and judges, disparage law reviews (and the books that sometimes result from them) on the ground that they often deal with abstruse topics, of little interest to the bar, and are sometimes full of jargon-filled, excessively academic, and sometimes impenetrable writing. Some of the objections are warranted, but at their best, law reviews show a high level of rigor, discipline, and care; they have a kind of internal morality. What might seem to be jargon is often a product of specialization, similar to what is observed in other fields (such as economics, psychology, and philosophy). Much academic writing in law is not intended for the bar, at least not in the short-term, but that is not a problem: Such writing is meant to add to the stock of knowledge. If it succeeds, it can have significant long-term effects, potentially affecting what everyone takes to be “common sense.”

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Update: Information for Submitting Articles To Law Reviews & Journals

Allen Rostron and Nancy Levit, both of the University of Missouri, Kansas City School of Law, have published Information for Submitting Articles to Law Reviews & Journals. Here is the abstract.

This document contains information about submitting articles to law reviews and journals, including the methods for submitting an article, any special formatting requirements, how to contact them to request an expedited review, and how to contact them to withdraw an article from consideration. It covers 204 law reviews. The document was fully updated in July 2015.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Short Law Review Article, Long Memory?

Erik M. Jensen, Case Western Reserve School of Law, has published "The Intellectual History of 'The Shortest Article in Law Review History'," in volume 59 of the Case Western Reserve Law Review. Here is the abstract.

"The Shortest Article in Law Review History" appeared in 2000 to a mixture of acclaim ("Brilliant!"), horror ("Don't you have anything better not to do?"), and indifference ("Huh?"). Since then, many have asked how the article came into being and what its effect on legal scholarship has been. (Well, the author's mother and sister did once raise those questions, or one of them anyway.) This new article provides readers with just about everything needed to understand a twenty-first century development in the life of the mind.

Download the paper from SSRN here.
And I remember Professor Jensen when he was writing (extensively) about buffalo law....