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You may recall the big deal that was made some years ago (I believe it was 2005) when top journals declared a moratorium on the behemoth law review article. It was supposed to allow for more and more readable articles to be published -- a real boon, ultimately, for scholarship and a relief both for readers and authors. The Yale Law Journal still has in its guidelines the following:

The Journal is committed to publishing work that is not only original, provocative, and persuasive, but also concise. Recently, the Journal joined with eleven other leading law journals in affirming our commitment to this goal.  The Journal strongly encourages submissions of fewer than 30,000 words (roughly 60 Journal pages) and strongly discourages submissions of more than 35,000 words (roughly 70 Journal pages). Authors? ability to state their arguments in concise terms is a factor in our consideration of manuscripts. The Journal may be unable to respond to authors submitting lengthy manuscripts in a timely fashion.

How's that working out?, you might ask. Consider the three articles published in the two most recent issues of the YLJ (Vol. 119, Nos. 7 & 8):

Jerry L. Mashaw, Federal administration and administrative law in the Gilded Age. 119 Yale L.J. 1362-1472 (2010).

 James Gray Pope, Contract, race, and freedom of labor in the constitutional law of involuntary servitude." 119 Yale L.J. 1474-1567 (2010).

 Abbe R. Gluck, The states as laboratories of statutory interpretation: Methodological consensus and the new modified textualism, 119 Yale L.J. 1750-1862 (2010).

Jerry Mashaw's article is the fourth in a series on the history of administrative law and administration, all of the individual pieces of which are quite brilliant and significant. I will assume that the other two articles, which I haven't yet read, are equally brilliant. But look at their length: 110 pp., 93 pp., and 112 pp. And note that all of the previous articles in Mashaw's series are approximately the same length (it looks like the shortest was over 85 pp.), and all were published since 2006. This is not an anomaly of the current volume's two final issues. An unscientific survey of YLJ's volume 119 reveals that of the 12 articles published (an average of 1.5 per issue), a whopping total of 2 came in under 70 journal pages. I realize and appreciate that YLJ has been a pioneer in adding different formats for writing, but for many tenure processes (including the one at my own school), the coin of the realm is articles, not essays, features, responses, online feature essays, etc.



I am not especially exorcised about the length of these articles, assuming that the work is brilliant and the articles' length to be essential to their argument -- and they must certainly be so, since YLJ published them! If YLJ or another journal wants to publish high-quality behemoths, well then by golly they ought to. But I have two issues with this practice, one rule-of-law like, the other administrative. If you want to publish behemoths, then don't have guidelines that "strongly discourage[]" submitting behemoths. That certainly seems like an easy call, even if it means conceding that new standards only last as long as the last editorial board's tenure. And in my role as an associate dean (talk about being a sucker!), I am frequently asked by worried junior colleagues about the law review submission process. My answers are already long and filled with apologies, sad faces, sarcastic laughter, head scratching, and the shrugging of shoulders. In my administrative role, I am asked to speak for and, implicitly, defend a set of institutions and practices that too frequently seems irrational, random, and -- dare we say it -- sometimes fixed. This is merely another frustrating data point that makes a sucky process seem suckier. Either follow the standards or get rid of them.

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