Writing and placing law review articles is endlessly fascinating to legal academics. Long a competitive but mysterious enterprise, legal scholarship has seen important recent developments. An increasing number of new professors come from fellowships at elite law schools, where they receive shared advice on writing and placement. Moreover, legal blogs now provide a public forum to compare notes about what it takes for scholarship to draw attention and place well, from title length to crafting abstracts. This program assesses the state of the art of legal scholarship from both a strategic and a critical perspective. It considers two principal questions. First, what are the best, or at least trendiest, approaches to framing, writing, and placing scholarship—whether at the substantive level of subject matter or method, or at the technical level of titles, abstracts, novelty claims, cover letters, etc.? Second, as these practices are routinized and shared, should we be concerned about them? Are the techniques that encourage elite journal editors to publish an article consistent with the norms of serious academic work? Or are there worrisome tensions between what it takes for an article to "succeed," and the values and integrity of serious legal scholarship?
Business meeting at program conclusion.