preLaw Magazine - Winter 2008 - (Page 9) news LAW SCHOOL Blogs: The death knell for law reviews? Blogging may make it harder for lesselite law reviews to compete, according to two law professors at Nova Southeastern University. That was one of several changes Robert Jarvis and Phyllis Coleman saw in an update to their 1997 study ranking student-edited law reviews based on the prominence of their lead-article authors. Jarvis said they see more law professors turning to blogging instead of authoring articles in law review journals, because of timeliness and greater opportunities for feedback. The trend will continue if tenure committees begin accepting blogging as being on par with traditional publishing, they said. The study, which appears in the Summer 2007 issue of the Law Library Journal, only included law reviews edited by students of a J.D.-granting law school accredited by the American Bar Association. Yale University garnered the top spot. “Last time, Columbia’s law review came out on top, although most people were more taken with the fact that the Yale Law Journal finished ninth,” Jarvis said. “This time, Columbia fell to third, while Yale zoomed into first place.” Harvard Law Review was a very close second — less than two points behind out of a possible 1,000. The number of law reviews ranked increased from 161 in 1997 to 171 in 2007. Jarvis said the increase reflects the number of new law schools that have come into existence. As a result of the heightened competition, law reviews at the bottom of the survey had a harder time in 2007 than in 1997. For example, the lowest-scoring law review in 1997 was California Western with 175.00 points. In 2007, the lowestscoring law review was Western State at 140.52 points. “That’s a significant difference,” Jarvis said. “The reputation of all the law reviews we ranked in both surveys tended to be pretty close to the reputation of the law review’s law school.” Jarvis and Coleman’s rankings give points based on the prominence of the 7,574 authors who wrote for the 171 journals between 2001 and 2005. In terms of results, Jarvis said the two surveys are remarkably consistent. “As in 1997, our goal in doing the study was to find out where law authors prefer to place their articles,” Jarvis says. “Obviously, writers want to have their articles read and therefore want to appear in the journals Winter 2008 9 http://www.scu.edu/law http://www.scu.edu/law
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