The announcement by a number of top law reviews that they will put a word limit on articles they are willing to accept for publication has generated a lot of talk in the blawgosphere. Until now, however, everybody has been dancing around the big question: just why are law review articles so long? My colleague Vic Fleischer is guest blogging at Conglomerate, where he offers one answer:
Over the last few days I've been editing my work in progress, an article about compensation of VCs. It's a complicated story, and as I go back and add in footnotes (for the benefit of student editors, of course) the word count keeps creeping up over 30,000. Something here has to give. In order to get your article accepted by student editors, you have to provide an extensive background section: students don't know what a venture capital fund is until you tell them. And you have to provide footnotes for facts that are common knowledge in the industry, like the fact that venture capital funds are smaller than buyout funds. All of this takes up space and makes for longer articles.
I think Vic's hit on the key point. When it comes to some issues (like most con law topics), the student editors who run the law reviews typically at least have opinions. (I mean, who doesn't have an opinion about, say, abortion.) In fields like corporate law or tax, however, the student editors rarely have a sufficient sufficient base of knowledge to know why a particular issue is important. So the first third or half of a typical article in those areas is a literature review designed to educate not the ultimate readers, who likely know the field and have at least general familiarity with the problem, but rather student editors who select articles for publication. If the top law reviews are going to be serious about word limits, their editors are going to have get a lot more serious about educating themselves as to a host of fields. Otherwise, the existing bias towards con law, jurisprudence, and other quasi-political topics in the top journals is just going to get worse. They'll look even more like heavily footnoted versions of the Washington Monthly or National Review than they already do.
