Ranking Secondary Law Journals
I have a brief paper up on ssrn that relies on John Doyle's outstanding law review citation database to rank secondary law journals: "Law [Review]'s Empire: The Assessment of Law Reviews and Trends in Legal Scholarship." It follows up on "The Relationship Between Law Review Citations and Law School Rankings" and is part of an issue of the Connecticut Law Review, which features Ronen Perry's important work. I suspect the paper's primary utility comes in ranking the top 100 secondary journals, though I'm again in interested in what having well-cited secondary journals says about a school.
Of the top 100 student-edited secondary journals, 58 are produced by students at just 15 schools. You might find this list interesting.
Of the top 100 student-edited secondary journals, 58 are produced by students at just 15 schools. You might find this list interesting.
| Law School | Number of Secondary Journals In Top 100 |
| Harvard | 8 |
| Columbia | 6 |
| Georgetown | 5 |
| California | 4 |
| Yale | 4 |
| UVA | 4 |
| Boston College | 3 |
| Fordham | 3 |
| Hastings | 3 |
| Michigan | 3 |
| Pennsylvania | 3 |
| American | 3 |
| NYU | 3 |
| Texas | 3 |
| William and Mary | 3 |
posted by Alfred Brophy at 10:33 AM
3 Comments:
As the president of Harvard Law Review told me one afternoon over a beer, if you're not a professor from an elite school, we don't even read your paper.
Yet, so many people defend the law reviews (esp the law professors at elite schools). Perhaps we should have medical students deciding what gets published in JAMA and Science. Perhaps not.
You might find this paper on the history of secondary journals at Harvard interesting:
http://lsr.nellco.org/harvard/students/papers/12
Hat tip: http://lsi.typepad.com/lsi/2007/01/specialty_journ.html
Thanks, Anthony. I enjoyed Jennifer Carter's paper. Lots of history in there, of which I was ignorant. And worth a post all its own. I'd like to highlight a couple of things: the secondary journals at Harvard have a longer history than at a lot of schools (International, Civil Rights--Civil Liberties and Journal of Legislation all go back to the 1960s); and Dean Saks cut back on the publication frequency of several journals in 1981 because, in part, he thought the law school wasn't getting its money's worth from an educational standpoint.
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