PrawfsBlawg has posted its Submission Angsting thread, which prompted me to write this post to ask our readers (including my co-bloggers) two questions:
- In your opinion, what is the ideal date to submit a spring law review article?
- When deciding between offers, how do you evaluate specialty law reviews?
Ideal Submission Date. When I first started as a professor, I heard that March 1 was the date most people thought was the best for spring submissions. The ideal date seems to be moving earlier and earlier, and I have heard February 1 or February 15 mentioned with increasing frequency. Some might suggest not worrying about the submission date — just submit when your article when it is ready. While I agree that you should wait to submit an article until it is ready (whenever “ready” is…), I have had colleagues who seemed to seriously under-place articles because they submitted at a poor time. Admittedly, most of these professors submitted well outside of the traditional windows.
Evaluating Specialty Law Reviews. The question about how to evaluate specialty law reviews reoccurs every time I submit an article. The conventional wisdom is – find out how your P&T committee values those journals and follow their lead. That is good advice, though I imagine some readers would like to hear how the market, in general, values specialty law reviews. Personally, I have published in a number of specialty law reviews — for two main reasons — (1) readership (e.g., I used to see the Delaware Journal of Corporate Law on my judge’s desk regularly) and (2) name recognition (the Harvard Business Law Review is probably going to go much further with many readers (and my P&T committee) than many flagship law reviews). I’ve heard formulas to rank specialty journals like — take ~25 spots [the PrawfsBlawg post in the update below says +25 to +50] off the publishing school’s rank if it is a specialty journal (this doesn’t work well when a top journal in your area is published by a low-ranked school) OR the top 10% or so specialty journals in your area are roughly equal to a 31-100 ranked flagship journal; and you should take a top-30 flagship journal over virtually any specialty journal. I know different schools will treat the question of specialty journals differently, and ideally we wouldn’t have to play this game (because the articles all end up on WestLaw), but I am truly interested in the different approaches.
Update: On the second question I found this helpful post on PrawfsBlawg from 2011, but I am still interested in other thoughts.
Feel free to share thoughts in the comments, or e-mail me directly.