Mainstream law review tries peer review

Leiter blogs about South Carolina Law Review’s recent endeavor – peer review article selection. The new policy for the pilot program can be found here. The policy starts out as follows: “Because we believe the current system of legal scholarship publication may be improved by changing how articles are selected, our Pilot Program will explore the feasibility of article selection through peer review in the context of a major, general interest law review.”  

The setup is pretty straightforward, except that all of the articles have a deadline (in October) and the reviews all have the same deadline (in December). The reviews are double blind: “Not only will the author not know the identity of the reviewers, but also the identity of the author will not be disclosed to the reviewers, for the sake of focusing the evaluation on substantive merit rather than other factors.” 

The policy does not appear to address simultaneous reviews, so it is unclear whether that is acceptable or what the expedited review policy might be. If we assume that simultaneous review and expedite are not options for submitting authors, then – and I mean this with all due respect to SCLR – why would a law professor submit their manuscript there? It would mean missing out on all other law review possibilities that fall (and part of the winter). This being said, I hope that SCLR gets a lot of submissions; their endeavor is an interesting and brave experiment.