As the law review submission cycle has gotten underway, there's been lots of talk about the ways that law reviews differ from traditional scholarly journals. For example:
- Law reviews, almost without exception, are edited by third-year law students not professors.
- Law reviews, in most cases, don't conduct traditional peer review (at least not with the same rigor commonly found in other scholarly journals).
- Authors are allowed to submit to many law reviews simultaneously. This leads to the question: "What if two journals want to publish the same submission?" Law reviews have solved this problem using a system called "expedite requests". An expedite request is essentially a note from the author letting a journal know that their article has been accepted by another law review, and that they must make a publication decision by a given date or else miss the opportunity to publish the article.
I'm curious how these differences developed? Why not follow the established model of scholarly peer review?