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Why Electronic Law Review Submission Policies Suck

Eugene Volokh passes along a question from a law review editor:

I hear ... that some professors actually prefer sending paper copies. The only halfway decent justifications I have heard are (1) that they can send a personalized cover letter via mail (this justification makes no sense as our online system allows for the submission of cover letters); and (2) that authors think they have a better chance of getting their submission promptly reviewed because the editor who reviews paper submissions will give them a quick look when logging them into the law review’s system. This latter explanation is at least plausible, but my experience is that this gives the author no advantage over online submissions, as I and other editors do the same thing with online submissions.

I write to ask for your help. I would like more information on this issue from professors. As your blog is read by a wide array of professors, I was wondering if you could put a post on your blog asking professors to comment on this issue, so I and others can get better information.

To which Suzanna Sherry responds:

The real problem with electronic submission is the variety of systems and requirements. For a paper submission, the process is identical for every law review—all you (or your assistant) must do is change the address, salutation, and first sentence of the cover letter. But submitting electronically is a nightmare: Some want single-spaced, some double; some require Word and others require pdf; some require registration (which itself requires creating and filing or remembering a password) and some don’t; some require abstracts, some allow them, and some don’t permit them at all; some allow (encourage? give an advantage to those who submit?) personalized cover letters and/or c.v.’s and some don’t; some allow Express-O, some prefer it or require it, and some don’t use it at all. And it all seems to change every year, so whatever we did the last time we submitted an article won’t work this time. I have no objection to electronic submissions, but can’t you standardize the requirements?

This is exactly right. The enormous variation in law review submission rules for electronic copies is infuriating. It takes at least three or four times as much work to submit papers electronically as it does to submit paper copies. As a result, the e-submission process mess is one of the reasons I’d rather focus on books and symposia pieces.