It seems that every time law review submission season comes around, a flurry of social media and blog posts speculate about when the demise of the law review system will come. It is true that there are some serious pathologies in the way that legal scholars find venues for their scholarship, but the law review model has been pretty persistent.
My guess is that if one had conducted a poll ten years ago about whether law reviews would continue to be dominant in 2019 for law faculty hiring, promotion, and compensation, many (or even most) people would say "no." Yet, at least from where I stand the system remains much as it has always been, and law review placements remain the coin of the realm in many institutions.
These thoughts led me to conduct a poll of my own on Twitter:
Over the next decade, the importance for law professors of publishing in *law reviews* (in terms of hiring, compensation, prestige, etc.) will:
— Robert Anderson (@ProfRobAnderson) February 23, 2019
Once we back out the "Just show me the results" respondents, we see that 68% of respondents say that law reviews will remain about the same or even increase in their influence over the next ten years, whereas only 32% say they will significantly decrease in influence. The place of law reviews may get a boost from the recent announcement that US News will release a scholarly impact ranking. The data for the ranking will come from Hein Online, which is very law-review-centric. I have some thoughts about the proposed ranking responding (in part) to its many critics.
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