Twenty-Five Year Decline in Law Review Subscriptions

In Law Review Circulation, Ross Davies (George Mason), Green Bag Almanac & Reader 2009 at 164, reports on the sad state of law review compliance with the USPS's requirement to report total paid circulation each year. His survey of the top 15 law reviews from 1979-80 to 2007-08 shows significant gaps in reporting circulation numbers -- about 25 percent of the total reportable years for the 15 law reviews have no data in his table, Total Paid Circulation, 1979-2008 for the Flagships of the U.S. News Top 15, according to my reckoning. Davies also observed that in some instances reported circulation numbers are not plausible because they are remarkably stable (e.g., Yale's circulation numbers in the 1980s and Vanderbilt's numbers in the 1990s).

True enough but what is remarkable to me is the dramatic decline in law review paid circulations during the last 25 years. Omitting the law reviews listed in Davies' table that did not report circulation data frequently enough to be useful (but keeping Yale and Vanderbilt's data despite the plausibility issue), I took a quick (as in blog post quality) look at the trend in paid law review subscription from 1983-84 to 2007-08 for Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Boalt, Penn, Michigan, Georgetown and Vanderbilt using the data Davies compiled.

The extent of the decline in paid subscriptions for these eight major law reviews surprised me. The total number of subscriptions for the law review combined declined 66%, from 29,083 in 1983-84 to 9,897 in 2007-2008. Another way to look at this is Harvard Law Review's subscription count in 1983-84 (8,762) almost equals the total number of paid subscription for Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Boalt, Penn, Michigan, Georgetown and Vanderbilt in 2007-2008.

Table 1 displays the cumulative subscription count in five year increments of the nine listed journals for the 25 years covered. [Click to enlarge] Check out Davies' article for earlier data.

Table 2 displays the 25-year decline in paid subscriptions for each title in five-year increments.

I discern no leveling off or end to this trend based on the above two tables. Do you?

Table 3 displays the 25-year decline in paid subscriptions for each title as a percentage of the title's 1983-84 paid subscription base. Note the declines for Harvard, Columbia, Michigan and Georgetown, all 70% or higher.

So where have all the paid subscribers gone? As a cost savings measure, law review subscriptions are relatively inexpensive. One doesn't get a huge payoff by canceling them when collection budgets have to be cut. But have academic and law firm libraries canceled their subscriptions when they made shelf space available by sending long runs of bound law review volumes to the dumpster? Has the ready availability of digital law review collections on LexisNexis, Westlaw, HeinOnline and law review websites eliminated the need for subscribing to law reviews? All likely possibilities but the sheer number of canceled subscriptions is larger than the law library subscriber base even if we take into account that many law libraries once subscribed to multiple copies of some of these titles. For a decline this substantial one has to think alumni are not subscribing as they once did. And then there is the irrelevance factor. Maybe law review articles simply are not as relevant to members of the bench and bar as they once were. Maybe it is time to cast aside the law review publishing model and replace the 200-some titles with a handful of peer-review law journals.

I think most every academic law librarian has roamed the law review stacks at least once thinking what a waste it was to be storing runs of unread and uncited law review articles, thinking only a select few titles will ever be used. Representatives of that select few are listed above and the long-term decline in their paid circulations should give us all something to think about. [JH]