Back in 2011 I got a request from the Chicago Law Review to referee an article for them, which sort of pissed me off. Today I got one from the Yale Law Journal:
I hope this note finds you well. I am an Articles Editor for Volume 125 of the Yale Law Journal, and I’m writing to see if you might be willing to serve as a referee for a paper we are considering for publication in the Journal.
I can but repeat part of what I said back in 2011:
Either the student-edited format makes sense or it doesn't. The whole purpose of peer review is to get students OUT of the process, not to supplement a decision that would remain in the hands of second and third year law students. A pure peer review/edit system has several advantages. First, more informed and experienced decision makers should make better decisions. Second, one key function of peer review is to provide expert advice at a stage at which the authors can still tweak the paper. Hence, the advice should go directly from the reviewer to the author, rather than being mediated through students. Third, making the decision dependent on peer review provides a strong incentive for authors to heed the advice and to improve the paper. Giving students final say means the author is incented to make the students editors happy rather than the more knowledgeable reviewer. Finally, leaving the final decision in the hands of students means that the reviewer has less incentive to provide his/her best analysis, since his recommendations presumably will not be conclusive and may not even impact the final product. The proposed Chicago system being neither fish nor fowl, there is no reason to think it will combine the best attributes of peer and student journals. To the contrary, for the reasons just noted, I suspect it will combine their worst.
Plus, there's this consideration:
By the way, speaking of my twenty-odd years in legal academics without a [Yale Law Journal] publication, if 20 years worth of [Yale] boards have rejected everything I've ever submitted to them, why does this board all of sudden think highly enough of my standing in the field to ask for a review? ... Shouldn't they be selecting people they've published? Or are they admitting that all those boards were wrong to reject all those articles of mine?
If my occasional rants amuse you, go read the whole 2011 post. I think it is one of my better rants.
