Challenging law review dominance.

INTRODUCTION

Up until the recent popularization of the internet and independent scholarly webpages, law reviews have dominated legal discourse.(1) This Aside seeks to examine the potentially dangerous shift from paper to server.(2) Part I sets out the historical relationship between student-run law reviews and the academy in order to make certain obvious and noncontroversial claims that are both abstruse and well-cited; it has been omitted for clarity's sake. Part II defends the traditional imperatives of the law review article format, its hyper-prolixical verbosity and its footnote-heavy citation style; it has also been removed for lack of support.(3) Part III argues for a vision of bluebooking as modality encoding via citation uniformity, thus enabling a new hermeneutics of meaning through reader decoding. This part is so dense and yet flaky it has swallowed itself in a Dough-Boy vortex and is now believed to be part of a legal theory pound cake,(4) inferentially observed only by occasional citation from authors attracted to its buttery goodness. Part IV is the only original thought in this whole Aside, but, in the tradition of legal work generally, it is both underdeveloped and fairly insignificant. It more or less amounts to arguing that web pages that seek to replace law reviews by publishing scholarly work on the internet tend to suck.(5)

IV. SUBSTITUTING HTML IN FAVOR OF THE LAW REVIEW: THAT SUCKING SOUND ISN'T JUST FOR NAFTA ANYMORE(6)

The Social Science Research Network ("SSRN"), a webpage that publishes scholarly work, has recently emerged to challenge the law reviews' traditional monopoly in the publication of legal articles.(7) Some applaud this development. In recent years, law reviews have been criticized for letting the patients run the asylum, in other words, letting those law students, recently demoralized as 1Ls, edit and shape professors' work.(8) Law professors, meanwhile, worry about the integrity of their law review submissions because they have seen direct proof that these students--having arrived at law school with excellent recommendations, stellar LSAT scores, and excellent college grades--are largely incompetent.(9) The SSRN allows professors to bypass student editing and provides a forum in which no article is declined web-publication for sucking too much. But the advantages of publishing with an ink and paper law review over the SSRN are manifold.(10)

[Part A argued within a game-theoretic framework against knowledge asymmetries found in typical Prisoner's Dilemmas and suggested that Coasian/Calabresian premises fared no better than Posnerian postulates in predicting negative externalities or mitigating transaction costs; but this Part was omitted at the last moment when we discovered that gratuitous economic theory was not going to get us tenure. Be advised, however, we were fully prepared to discuss these issues. We're just that bad-assed.(11)] B. The Citation Game

One advantage to a professor publishing in a law review over the SSRN is that of generating reciprocating citation. An article's authority and importance is often judged within the academy according to the number of times that article is cited by subsequent law review articles.(12) But neither citation from nor to web articles counts toward these citation computations.

A second, related, advantage has to do with what has come to be known as ego-citing. Professors publishing in law reviews can and do bump up their citation count by citing to their own previously published articles. Some authors even cite...