Creating a journal: two perspectives.

• Author: Barger, Coleen M.

PERSPECTIVE ONE: THE MEDIUM

"I think we could start an appellate journal. A faculty-edited journal. No one else is doing anything like that." Tom Sullivan made the pitch to then-dean-candidate Rod Smith in an informal meeting in the faculty lounge that afternoon. I could tell Rod was intrigued, although whether it was the idea itself or Tom's enthusiasm that had gripped him, I wasn't sure. I like to think that one of the reasons Rod accepted our offer was that he wanted to be a part of that new journal and faculty enterprise.

But it is one thing to have (or to recognize) a good idea, and it is another thing to find a way to realize it. We were fortunate: Once he became dean, Rod supported the creation of The Journal, both financially and in terms of the academic recognition he could garner for a fledgling publication.

There were so many things to decide in those early days:

* Who is our target audience? That was an easy question to answer, and we are glad that you are reading The Journal and this essay.

* How many issues can we realistically publish a year? Having a small staff, we figured two a year was doable; it was and is.

* Where will we find our articles? From our own experience looking for these kinds of articles in the general-interest law reviews, we knew that bringing such works together in a single publication would be a service to the bench, the bar, and the academy. We were sure that a journal like this would be the ideal vehicle for both theoretical and practical scholarship on the foremost issues facing appellate judges and practitioners. But this was in the days before BePress and ExpressO, and it wasn't as if we could advertise.

We had to go begging--at first. Former Dean Larry Averill had served as Administrative Assistant to then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and so the Chief Justice gave us permission to publish one of his speeches in our first issue. We all called judges and professors we knew, and Tom even sweet-talked me into writing an article about an interesting development in "vendor-neutral" citation. Eventually, as authors discovered that publishing their work here assured them of getting their ideas before their most desirable readers, submissions started coming in over the digital transom. But when we were soliciting articles for that first issue, all we had was hope.

* How is this journal going to look? We wanted a journal with an attractive, reader-friendly layout. We were more concerned about having an...