Brian Galle has posted a discussion draft of A Proposal for Law Journal Reform, which is a project of The AALS Section on Scholarship, Advisory Committee on Law Journal Reform. Here is the introduction:

No one is satisfied with today’s legal publishing. The long-standing tradition of simultaneous submission to student-edited journals has always involved tradeoffs, but the costs of that approach have grown dramatically over the last decade. Where once even top journals faced a relatively manageable task in identifying promising submissions, technological innovation now enables authors to easily submit to hundreds of journals with a few clicks. The result has been enormous practical and even ethical pressures on students and authors. Top journals receive more than 4,000 submissions annually. Selection outcomes are often driven not by merit but by insider knowledge, such as whether an author knows when journals are open to selecting articles or how to “expedite” publication offers to more-preferred journals. Increasingly, top journals are demanding exclusive submission windows, undermining one of the core strengths of the traditional structure. With few clear rules of the road, opportunities for gamesmanship on each “side” are prevalent, and may be mutually reinforcing.

While we believe that legal academia can and should agree on “best practices” to improve how authors and editors conduct themselves, we are realists. No set of idealized norms can succeed in the face of enormous structural pressures. Fundamental reforms are necessary.

Thus, the Section offers two possible paths for reform, each of which can be further tailored. In the simpler path, authors will submit to a small number of journals at a time, and must accept the first offer received. Journals will not extend offers during a “quiet period” of four weeks or so. A more ambitious path involves adoption of a two-round Shapley matching system, better known as the “med school” match. In that path, authors will rank a set of journals from which they would accept offers, and journals will rank those articles that meet their publication threshold. Both paths can be combined with a new peer review pool, as we describe, and additionally AALS Member Schools can adopt and encourage compliance with a set of complementary best practices for authors and editors.

Though we detail the strengths and potential weaknesses of these options in more detail below, we want to emphasize here their overwhelming advantage over the status quo: each would essentially eliminate expedited review. Expedited review is the root cause of nearly all the problems we and other stakeholders have identified with the current approach. It motivates mass submissions and other, even less fortunate, gaming behaviors. It turns many journals into screening editors for journals that are more preferred by authors, greatly increasing both their workloads and frustrations. The time pressures it imposes make meaningful peer review next to impossible. And it systematically rewards authors who are most expert at navigating the system.

An alternative, of course, would be to turn to the exclusive-submission model common in other academic disciplines. We believe that would be too radical a step. It would greatly extend time to acceptance for most authors without alleviating the crushing workload of top-journal editors. Further, many outstanding law journals — although not enough, in our view — already operate under the traditional exclusive-submission/peer-review model of the social sciences. We believe that preserving both paths is important for the discipline.

I know that law professors love to complain about law journals and the law journal process, and I know that my own experiences surely bias my assessment of the system, but my view is that law reviews are not that bad. (As I’ve written before, most law review articles are not good, but I’m not convinced this is anything other than an application of Sturgeon’s Law — “90% of everything is crap.”)

In particular, the proposal focuses on two problems with the current system. The first is that prestige/quality sorting is imperfect, so the best articles are not always published in the most prestigious journals. This is surely true, but I’m not sure how true it is. When I come across new articles I notice a pretty consistent correlation between better articles and better journals — it’s far from perfect, but I think there’s a marked correlation. And so the question is how much the correlation is likely to increase from these new systems. I don’t think we know that, especially if we don’t know what the current correlation coefficient is, or what the causes are.

The second problem is that law review editors have too many articles to read, and therefore spend too little time on most of the articles. I take this problem more seriously, since it (according to the proposal) reflects the consensus view of law review editors. But there are good reasons for the systems we have, and so it’s hard to come up with a superior one that is likely to get any traction.

That leads me to wonder if both of the proposed solutions are too ambitious, since they require a lot of journals and authors to buy into the new regime. What if, instead, we focused on disclosure and promise enforcement on the part of the authors? What if we simply required authors to disclose how many other journals they were currently submitting to? Journals could focus their efforts, if they wanted to, on the authors who were not broadly playing the field. And what if we also allowed authors to promise to accept an offer if they received it? Journals could focus their efforts on these sure-yield articles if they wanted to.

Allowing both of these options would effectively let authors and journals opt in to one of the AALS-proposed systems — in which authors submit only to a small batch of journals and promise to accept any of them. But it would also make it possible to make marginal moves towards that equilibrium without requiring everybody to move at once. And it would leave journals and authors free to make their own judgments, which would let us find out how strong the demand for the proposed equilibrium really is.