Organizations and Markets

Students as Editors!?!?! A Law Journal Bleg

22 November 2006 at 2:16 pm Nicolai Foss 3 comments

| Nicolai Foss |

My employer, Copenhagen Business School, has recently decided to adopt a “Top 60 Journals” list. It contains the usual suspects (SMJ, AMJ, ASQ, Org. Science, etc.) and a number of lesser journals, including some distinct outliers (such as Scandinavian Journal of Management :-)). It has now been proposed by the Dean that the list be used in connection with promotions; for example, a Full Professor must, according to the proposal, have at least one article published in a Top 60 journal. An extremely modest requirement, one would think. Not so.

One problem among the many, many extremely serious problems that the opponents of the list have identified is that it does not include law journals. And the law department at CBS is therefore unhappy with the list and the fact that it be used as an instrument in connection with hiring and promotion decisions. The law professors argue that the institutions of journal publication are 1) not as important in law as in management research and 2) are very different between management and law.

Thus, to my great astonishment, I learned from a law professor that the major US law journals are not edited by peers. They are in fact …. [gasp!] … edited by students! Here is how Wikipedia describes the editing of the Harvard Law Review:

Using a competitive process that takes into account first-year grades, an editing exercise, and a written commentary on a court decision, The Harvard Law Review selects between 41 and 43 editors annually from the second-year Law School class, which numbers 560.

Two editors from each of first-year class’s seven sections (fourteen in all) are selected half by their first year grades and half by their scores on the writing competition. Another twenty are selected solely on their scores on the writing competition. The other seven to nine are selected by a discretionary committee, either to fulfill the review’s race-based affirmative action program, to select students who just missed the cut by either of the other two processes, or by some other criteria as the committee sees fit.

Apparently, the journal has been edited by students since it was founded in 1887. It has published papers that even an economist knows of (e.g., the famous Calabresi and Melamed paper in 1972), in addition to papers by Louis Brandeis, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and many other luminaries.

It seems fair to conclude that this strange institution has survived the test of time. Here are some questions:

• Were these journals recognized as major journals from the beginning?
• To what extent are senior people (law professors) involved — after all?
• Can you see any distinct advantages in this way of organizing the editing process of these journals that more traditional journals may miss?
• Are there successful journals in other disciplines that are also being run by students?

Entry filed under: - Foss -, Institutions.