Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Abstract

But the difficulties with student-run journals explain why a niche has opened up for faculty-run journals, both as competitors and complements. The University of Chicago has, for example, four facultyrun journals and three student-run journals that have learned to coexist even as they seek to obtain articles from the same nucleus of faculty members. The faculty journals survive because their editors can supply something that student editors cannot. Let me indicate what those missing ingredients are. In the first place, with faculty-run journals there is no struggle for control of text. Rarely (make that only once, and under atypical circumstances that do not bear recounting) have I entered into a noncooperative arrangement with an author. If I sense that an author and I will not get along-whether because of differences in temperament or in intellectual orientation- I will not accept an article. Happily, however, that problem almost never arises because the faculty authors who submit articles to faculty journals have already been around the track as well, and they know the presuppositions and biases that I bring to my work. Relying on their commendable sense of self-interest, they will shy away from me if they see that incompatible intellectual styles could frustrate their own work. The reputation that one acquires, both as an editor and a scholar, exerts a useful sorting effect on the pieces that are submitted for review. The articles are well matched to the editor, and this immediately reduces the travail in readying them for publication. The advantages of a faculty-run journal do not end with this matching function. In addition, the level of experience on all sides means that each editorial engagement is not a voyage into the unknown. One early decision is whether to send the paper out to a referee. I must say that early on-here on the sage advice of my colleague Phil Kurland, then editor of the Supreme Court Review-I decided that it was not necessary to consult a referee before disposing all submitted papers. Instead, when I read a paper that I really liked, I just accepted it by mail. My own view is that articles that have some real wit about them should be accepted even if they are wrong in some particulars.

First Page

87

Volume

70

Publication Date

1994

Download

Share

COinS