Law reviews dominate American legal scholarship.They shape academic reputations, supply citations for judicial opinions, and sometimes, nudge doctrine itself. Yet their structure is widely misunderstood. It is in law reviews that law students select, publish, and legitimize scholarship without the professional peer review that governs other academic disciplines. That feature—student control without expert oversight—is unique. And it is widely criticized.
The complaints are familiar: student editors lack training, misunderstand what makes scholarship valuable, and privilege stylistic conformity over intellectual merit. But those critiques miss the central point. The problem is not that students fall short of their role; it is that the profession has mistaken what their role is. Law reviews are not peer-reviewed journals and were never meant to be. Yet hiring committees, deans, and tenure reviewers treat law review placement as a signal of merit, quality, and rigor—even when the process includes none of those guarantees.
This mismatch between purpose and perception has real consequences. Authors tailor submissions to please second- and third-year law students. Editors, in turn, select articles they think will raise the prestige of their institutions. The result is prestige economy in which reputational cues often outweigh substantive judgments. For junior scholars, a single top placement can define a career; a missed cycle can derail one. That is not incidental. It is a system working exactly as it has evolved to work.
LINKS
Read “The Prestige Economy of Legal Scholarship,” co-authored by Jeffrey A. Katz and published by The Florida Law Review.