New Article Spotlight: Revisiting the Imperial Scholar: Market Failure on Law Review?

UNLV LawProf Rachel Anderson has published a very interesting draft on SSRN; though not specifically about criminal law, it will be of interest to many CrimProfs.  The abstract: This article argues for reforms in the institution of student-run law reviews. Specifically, it calls for an increased understanding of the potential for bias in the article-selection process. Further it calls for institutional retraining to support the implementation of new criteria and standards and facilitate more accurate evaluation of scholarship.

The evaluation of legal scholarship is often based on assumptions stemming from socio-cultural understandings of law and society that do not address or incorporate the breadth of American society across lines of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. Nor is it reasonable to expect them to do so. No one scholarly norm or standard can rigorously analyze the full range and extent of the breadth and depth of American society. This inherent inability demands a plurality of ideologies, methodologies, norms, and standards to facilitate and ensure a complex and rigorous intellectual debate. The reforms suggested in this article are intended to address the hurdles that law review editors must overcome to effectuate a more intellectually rigorous and informationally valuable article-selection process.

This article uses a hybrid methodology employing the tools and insights of both critical race theory and law and economics. It begins with issues of bias in legal scholarship raised in the two preceding decades by Richard Delgado, a leading critical race theorist, and Edward Rubin, a former Chair of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Socio-Economics. Then, it follows in the tradition of law and economics scholars and Nobel Prize winner Garry Becker utilizing the tools of economic analysis in non-market contexts. Specifically, this article utilizes economic theories and concepts such as market failure, informational asymmetry, switching costs, and network effects to develop a deeper understanding of institutional bias on law reviews. Finally, it employs scholarship on rhetoric and critical reading skills to identify opportunities for reform. [Jack Chin]