The cited
study, which unfortunately isn’t up on a free archive, shows that many people surveyed,
including many law professors, advocate reforms such as peer review and blind
review (also, fewer bad edits). This isn’t
a flaw in the survey, but it is a flaw in the prescriptions: saying we should
have peer review and blind review is like saying we should add water and also decrease
the moisture content. I have been asked
to do peer review on a number of articles over the past few years—see, law
reviews are listening!—and they’ve always been formally “blinded” and I’ve always known without doing any research
who wrote them, because I go to WIPIP. This
is a well-recognized effect of peer review.
Maybe blinding on
intake (by hypothesis, when the less experienced law review editors are
inadvertently basing their initial screening less on field-specific knowledge
and more on reputation) would help even if the ultimate peer review isn’t
blind. That’s not how peer review works
in other fields, but that doesn’t make it wrong for law reviews.
Relatedly, a feature of asking respondents what reforms they
support, from a list of possibilities, is that they favor stuff that helps them
even if it creates burdens elsewhere in the system—professors wanted articles
editors to explain their rejections! And
the methodology has trouble capturing tradeoffs like peer review/blind
review. So nobody but professors was
enthusiastic about getting rid of the standard requirement that a citation has
to be provided for (almost) every assertion, but everybody thought that law
reviews were too long. Like my
colleagues, I would’ve thought that citation metastasis was low-hanging fruit
there, but apparently not for many of the respondents—because “cite everything”
has different functions for law review editors and people who are reading in
order to cherry-pick arguments that are useful for them than it does for
writers and other readers. Nobody is wrong here, but we can’t all be
satisfied.
As for the overediting complaints aired in the study, fair
enough. Lord knows I’ve gotten annoying
edits (but I’ve also gotten fantastic edits by students who did incredible
work). But I believe working with editors
who ask for weird things serves a pedagogical purpose. By contrast, most of my non-law review
experience has involved minimal editing, for pure copyediting errors at most,
and it’s deprived me of input on whether I’m communicating in the way I want
to.
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