The Author bites back

Something tells me there's a story behind the recent Richard A. Posner article on law reviews in the latest issue of Legal Affairs. Of course, there's typically no reason to wonder what motivates a new publication from Posner, as they are so common that it's almost comical. Recall that this man has also been a federal circuit court judge since the mid-80s. I wonder if Posner doesn't sometimes write a new article or book by accident. In fact, his recent book about public intellectuals has an air of mishap about it.

But this piece makes me wonder if Posner didn't have a recent experience of heavy-handed editing with a fresh-faced student at a law review. Not that Posner's observations are wrong. I've read a lot of law review articles, but don't subscribe to any, despite the fact that I study law and legal systems. I get several journals from within my discipline, but never presume that a given law review will have anything of interest. I only read law review articles that come up in lit review searches, or that have been cited in other works, or maybe are written by authors I know. As a reader, I just don't find law reviews interesting. The articles are too long, usually unfocused and meandering or too focused and abstruse, and often contentious and remote from practical learning.

I published an article in a law review, and while I can confirm that they turn stuff around with agreeable speed, the process was quite frustrating. The article wasn't terribly long, but it contained statistical analysis, which the law student editors were woefully unprepared to evaluate. The first response I got from the editors was that I had to find "citations" for the "numbers" I was presenting. At first, I thought that they meant the data sources weren't noted sufficiently, but I eventually realized that they didn't understand that I had actually produced new information. Law school appears to convince people that all knowledge comes in the form of someone else's prior assertion. I think I would have had an easier time writing about the legal implications of the Prime Directive on Ent intervention in the attack on Isengard, since I could have cited Star Trek episodes and Tolkien, than to present fairly basic statistical results.

I'm sure Posner is right that reform of the law review is not forthcoming. That's one of the reasons I suspect that this brief article is a response to some personal experience. I would have welcomed the opportunity to take a swipe at the law review editors asking me who originally reported the standard errors of my logit. Posner, as an economically-minded thinker, doesn't usually devote effort to such obvious lost causes. Still, he often doesn't exercise a lot of quality control, demonstrating his embrace of the old economists' adage: Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.