law review ranking fails to take suckiness of law review into account.

[brian lauter]

Law Review sucks. The same can be said for rankings, and, since misery loves company, it only makes sense to combine the two.

Perhaps trying to prove that two wrongs really do make a right, The Faculty Lounge has assembled what it calls "The Kindest Rankings of the 'Top 25' Law Reviews."

The Faculty Lounge's rankings are based on U.S. News' peer assessment score, on citations by other journals, and by citation impact of the journal. Any school that ranks in the top 25 in any of these categories makes it into the Kind 25.

As I looked at the Faculty Lounge’s rankings, I was struck by the absence of several important variables. The Faculty Lounge neglected to factor in the number of non-italicized periods after the word "Id" in the journals. It also forgot to consider the amount of passive voice in each journal and the number of instances of explanatory parentheticals not beginning with a past participle. Maybe most egregiously, the Faculty Lounge failed to factor in the number of times a journal printed multiple internal cross references in the wrong order.

Instead, the Kind 25, and the rankings schemes it references, seem to focus exclusively on the number of citations a law review receives. This seems odd, given most law reviews' pathological dedication to the minutiae of legal citation and writing style.

It reminded me of an interesting article I read a few weeks ago by Judge Posner titled "Against the Law Reviews." Posner noted that "the average quality of [editors'] suggested revisions is low," and that "the revisions they suggest (or impose) exacerbate the leaden, plethoric style that comes naturally to lawyers."

All of this begs the question: If law review rankings only value the number of times a journal is cited, and a pedantic obsession with style and citation rules is not improving the quality of law review articles, why do law review editors and members spend so much time and energy manufacturing arbitrary style and citation rules and forcing law professors to adhere to them?

Sure law reviews articles should cite sources accurately and consistently, but I think law reviews would be much more successful and much more useful if they focused more on publishing good scholarship and less on publishing perfect footnotes.

Comments

[Jay]

I couldn't agree more. Both of my roomates are on law review and while they seem to have an excellent grasp on how to cite the names of cases from the Tax Court and Board of Tax Appeals (a la bluebook rule 14.5.3), both have a considerable misconception of what good scholarship, and a worthy intellectual pursuit, actually are.

Furthermore, I'll argue that law review membership actually manufactures a worse law student. Focus on the minutiae and tedium of the bluebook usurps intellectual energies that could otherwise be spent actually thinking - actually reflecting - or, wait for it, solving actual problems. Instead, law review stifles the thought process and bounds the member to a stressful, and let's face it, pointless experience contained within the 415 blue pages of a spiral notebook.

What law review DOES do is inform a prospective employer that you are willing to sign your life away to tedium in the future forms of empty research exercises and "due diligence." Membership on law review informs a firm that you are willing to be intellectually shackled to build your resume: And if you're willing to do that for a resume builder, imagine the depths of sludge you can be dragged through for money.

When the great axe falls and a "review" of a higher sort is in order, I like to picture a law review member standing at the pearly gates, while a winged guard asks the reason that he joined law review. That's when the reality of his decision will have caught up with him, he'll put his hand over his eyes, slump his shoulders, and he will cry.

[Brian]

Haha. Wow.

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