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Complaining about the law journal publishing system is an age-old tradition among the professoriate. Some people take umbrage with the student-run nature of the process, while others bemoan the often chaotic way that law review articles are submitted and accepted for publication. Some people hate both.

So it shouldn't surprise anyone that a new draft proposal on reforming the law journal process from the Association of American Law Schools section on scholarship is generating lots of early buzz.

The proposal calls for limiting the number of journals to which authors can pitch their articles or using a matching option akin to the medical match system that places residency candidates into training positions.

The AALS' section on scholarship held a session at the association's annual meeting about a year ago to gather feedback on the current process, then formed the advisory committee on law journal reform, which has spent the past year weighing ideas for improving the submission process.

As part of its work, the committee surveyed staff of law journals. Its research found that most participants—law professors seeking to get published and students running law journals—are not satisfied with the current system. Among the problems they identified:

• Journals are inundated with article submissions (as many as 4,000 annually at one top journal) and editors cannot read all of them. Many journals also received hundreds of requests annually for "expedited reviews" of articles from authors hoping to place their work in more prestigious journals. The introduction of online submission platforms has made it much easier for authors to offer their work to many journals.
• In the absence of time to thoroughly review all submissions, journals fall back on other proxies for quality, such as where the author teaches and where their previous scholarship has been published.
• Authors can also "game" the selection process through the timing of their requests for expedited review.
• Midtier journals often see their accepted articles withdrawn when the author gets a slot at a higher-ranking journal.

"In short, the current system has several extremely serious failings, and none of these failings can readily be changed with small tinkering at the margins," the proposal reads. "The failings are driven by the inevitable pressures of simultaneous submission and expedited review. No reform can offer meaningful change unless it addresses those facts."

The proposal to improve the process offers two paths: One is the so-called "limited submission with mandatory acceptance;" the other is the "matching" option.

Under the limited submission with mandatory acceptance model, authors would be limited to submitting to 10 or 20 journals at a time. Journals would have a four-week "quiet period" in which to read the submission then could offer an acceptance at the end of that period. Authors would then be required to accept that offer—thus cutting down exponentially on the number of submissions journal receive and the "expedited review" game some professors play.

Under the matching option, authors would rank by preference the journals they would most like to be published in, and the journals would likewise rank the articles they want. An online platform would then use an algorithm to place articles according to those dual preferences. The submission rounds would take place on predetermined dates and a committee established by the AALS' Scholarship Section would oversee the process. Authors would be bound to the matches the system establishes.

Separate from those two proposals is the idea of creating a peer-review pool among faculty that would be available to law journals to help parse submissions.

Neither of the revamped submission options is radical, said AALS section on scholarship chair Brian Galle, a Georgetown University law professor who circulated the draft. But Galle added that the matching system is a more ambitious change than the limited submission idea.

"Students are still in charge. They're still making the decisions," Galle said. "They're still deciding how many issues to publish and what to emphasize. Both proposals are kind of tinkering with the process of how articles flow to the students for their consideration."

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