The American Constitution Society reports of efforts at the leading law reviews to reduce the bloating of American law journals.
"In mid-December, the Harvard Law Review conducted a nationwide survey of law faculty regarding the state of legal scholarship. Nearly 800 professors completed the survey and submitted their feedback. Complete tabulations of the survey will soon be available on the web. Importantly, the survey documented one particularly unambiguous view shared by faculty and law review editors alike: the length of articles has become excessive. In fact, nearly 90% of faculty agreed that articles are too long. In addition, dozens of respondents submitted specific comments, identifying the dangers of this trend and calling for action. Survey respondents suggested that shorter articles would enhance the quality of legal scholarship, shorten and improve the editing process, and render articles more effective and easier to read.
The law reviews listed above are very grateful for the constructive feedback and wish to acknowledge a role in contributing to this unfortunate trend in legal scholarship. To the extent that the article selection or editing process encourages the submission and publication of lengthier articles, each of the law reviews listed above is committed to rethinking and modifying its policies as necessary. Indeed, some have already done so. The vast majority of law review articles can effectively convey their arguments within the range of 40-70 law review pages, and any impression that law reviews only publish or strongly prefer lengthier articles should be dispelled. Ultimately, individual law reviews will have to decide for themselves how best to resolve these concerns. Please know, however, that editors across the country are cognizant of the troubling trend toward longer articles and are actively exploring how to address it."
As the statement implies, several of these law reviews will be limiting their articles selection process only to articles 70 pages in length or less. All 11 are committed to reducing the length of legal scholarship.
This explains my recent experience with the Yale Law Journal, which strongly encouraged me to shorten my new article, "Globalization and Distrust." I complied, cutting more than 5 pages and eliminating a few footnotes. (The most painful part was removing some references to Tom Franck's amazing work.)
But I am strongly against mechanical limits on article length. Some arguments simply require more exposition to carry through successfully. The Yale Law Journal wasn't guilty of that error in my case, but I would hate to see law reviews impose any firm limits on the length of their articles.
My longest article is "Diaspora Bonds" (NYU Law Rev.), some 95 pages in length. I could have split the paper into two readily, severing the case study in securities regulation from my general international law claim. But the case study helped crystallize the issues so nicely that a shorter piece would have been the poorer for it.
My second longest is "The New, New Property" (Texas Law Rev.), which weighs in at 83 pages. I worked very hard to write the piece as concisely and crisply as possible, but the large number of facets of the argument required, I thought, the length.