Academic Legal Writing - Eugene Volokh [132]
I've seen the same with other students I've known. One Harvard student whom I advised circulated his article, got offers from two top 20 main journals, and published it in the Northwestern Law Review, a journal that's pretty clearly in the top 15. One of my UCLA students circulated two of her articles to the main journals at the top 50 law schools, and to specialty journals at the top 20. On the first, she got three offers from primary journals and three from specialty ones; she accepted an offer from a specialty journal at Harvard. On the second, she got six offers from primary journals and nine from specialty ones, and accepted the one from the U.C. Davis Law Review.
Another UCLA student got offers for her article from the Georgetown Immigration Law Journal and the Columbia Human Rights Law Review, both well-respected publications at top 15 law schools. (Note that “law journal” and “law review” are essentially synonyms.) My brother had an article published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review before he even started law school.
Remember, you've invested a lot of effort in your article. If you publish it, you'll get a valuable credential, and you might actually help improve the law a little bit. Don't let the opportunity slip away.
2. You should
What if you do have a chance to publish your article as a student Note at your own school? You might still prefer to send the piece out to be competitively considered by other journals.
This requires some effort, but I think it gives you a better credential, unless your own journal is a primary journal at a Top 20 or so school (e.g., the Northwestern Law Review), or perhaps a specialty journal at a Top 5 or so school (e.g., the Harvard Journal on Legislation). People who see a home-school Note publication on a resume may assume the student was on the journal, and discount the publication because journals tend to publish their own students' work with less quality screening than they use for outside work. But when people see a publication in a journal at a different school, they'll realize that the article was competitively selected, and might think more highly of it.
Before sending out your article to other journals, you should think about how this will look to your fellow journal members. If they see such behavior as disloyal, then ruining your relationship with them might not be worth the extra credential value of an outside publication. And you certainly should not look for an outside placement after you've already agreed to publish in your journal, or even after you've submitted it for consideration by your journal (since such submissions to your own journal usually carry an implicit promise that you'll accept an offer of publication).
But journals ought to welcome their members' publishing their work elsewhere—and if they don't see it that way, you should be able to persuade them. First, it's no harm to the journal: A journal's reputation turns on the school's reputation and on the quality of the articles from outside authors, not on the quality of its own students' Notes.
Second, it's good for other students on the journal. If a journal has room for, say, 12 student Notes per year, and 20 people want to publish their pieces, then your placing your good article in another journal means one more open slot for the other students. And third, it's good for the school and for student authors when the students' work is published in outside journals rather than inside ones.
In fact, I think journals (other than the primaries at the top 20 schools and specialty journals at the top 5 schools) should adopt a policy of advising their students to send their article out for competitive publication. Not all students will follow this advice; some people won't think that the extra credential is worth the trouble. But students should be encouraged to think that outside publication is