Like Water for Law Reviews: An Introduction to The Journal of Law

ABSTRACT:

The Journal of Law (http://journaloflaw.us/) looks a lot like a conventional law review, but it is really a bundle of small, unconventional law journals, all published together in one volume. Each journal is separated from the others by its own black-bordered title page. Look at the print edition edge-wise and you will see. This structure saves money over separate publication. It also frees editors of the individual journals to spend more time finding and refining good material, and less time dealing with mundane matters relating to the printing and distribution of their work product. Thus the Journal of Law’s generic name: it is no one journal in particular, and it is not tied to any particular institution (like, say, the Stanford Law Review), subject (like the Tax Law Review), specialty (like the Journal of Law & Economics), or method (like the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies). The idea is that the Journal of Law will be an incubator of sorts, providing for legal intellectuals something akin to what business schools’ incubators offer commercial entrepreneurs: friendly, small-scale, in-kind support for promising, unconventional ideas for which (a) there might be a market, but (b) there is not yet backing among established, deep-pocketed powers-that-be.