What Are Law Reviews Good For?

Adam recently posted his laments about the state of law reviews, which has been an issue only since the 1930s. I have a different theoretical lens that fills a gap in the literature that, at first blush, seems counterintuitive, and for the first time in the history of civilization fills an unexplored niche. I have now run out of law-review clichés (but invite commenters to list their favorites). 

The Washington Free Beacon story about the publication practices at the Harvard Law Review moves me not at all. If web sites can be "rags," the Beacon is an egregious one. As I write this post, the main headline reads, "Trump Delivers Victory in 12-Day War: Thank You, Mr. President, for Your Attention to This Matter." I put no reliance on a document review from any organization with such a thin connection to reality and committed obeisance to a regime that itself treats reality as an obstacle to overcome. Maybe somebody with more time will dig through the thousands of pages of documents the Beacon made available. As far as I know, no one has questioned their authenticity although it would be fair to wonder whether the Beacon has curated the documents it made available.

Still, Adam is not wrong, and he raises a good question. What good are law reviews in a world of widely available online sources where authors can quickly connect with audiences (such as the blog post you are reading)? Do law reviews now cause more harm than good?

It's Time to Get Rid of Law Reviews

The Washington Beacon has published an absolutely jaw-dropping piece about the Harvard Law Review's article selection process, which allegedly gives substantial consideration not just to the assumed identity (race, gender, sexual orientation) of the author, but to the assumed identity of the authors of sources cited. (Who knew that I should have been indicating in every citation the race, gender, and orientation of the author?)

I haven't bothered submitting to HLR for some time, but if the allegations are true, it still leaves me dismayed that I have had my time wasted as an author and furious that I have had my time wasted doing outside reviews. Don't ask me to do free reviews when it's just for show. I'm just waiting for the class action...

It’s easy to dismiss the HLR fiasco as an example of woke gone wild, and that’s undoubtedly part of the problem, but the more fundamental problem is that student editors should have no business selecting articles. Indeed, as I will argue below, law reviews are a medium that has served its purpose and they should shut down—there’s a much better way to disseminate legal scholarship: connecting authors directly to legal research databases (direct-to-database publishing).

Bulgaria finally adopts personal insolvency law

At long, long last, Bulgaria yesterday finally became the last EU Member State to adopt a personal insolvency law (Malta's law, effective late last year, seems to provide relief only for entrepreneurial debts, but it technically extends relief to individuals owing such debts, which is all the relevant EU Directive requires). To say the Bulgarian parliament adopted this law begrudgingly would be a significant overstatement of the enthusiasm for this new procedure--after many years of resistance, Bulgarian lawmakers seem to have relented under financial pressure from EU authorities. "Begrudgingly" also seems to be an apt characterization for how the new law offers debt relief to individuals, given its requirements and restrictions, but we'll have to see how the law is implemented. In any case, this is a watershed event worthy of note. 

AI Models on Law School Exams

The question of how well AI can do on law school exams is one that interests me, since I give exams and want them to be a measure of how much my students have learned (as opposed to their skills at using AI -- although I want them to learn those too). Others appear to be interested too -- just see the ssrn downloads for papers on this topic.  Caveat: I can't pretend that I have more than the shallowest of understandings of AI models.  But this cool new paper I came across might be of interest to folks.  

The paper is from a set of scholars at ETH in Zurich (a place long known for its excellent research).  As I understand the draft (and, to repeat, I don't understand a lot of this stuff), the paper finds that the large language models (LLMs) don't do that great when you increase the level of reasoning required on the exam.  I was also intrigued to read (I think) that LLMs are not necessarily better on multiple choice exams than essay type ones.  From the abstract, here is a sentence that stood out: "Our evaluation on both open-ended and multiple-choice questions present significant challenges for current LLMs; in particular, they notably struggle with open questions that require structured, multi-step legal reasoning".  

The paper is "LEXam: Benchmarking Legal Reasoning on 340 Legal Exams" 

Among the other cool things about this paper to me is how collaborative it is -- students, professors, and even judges.  To me, it reflects well on the culture of the institution that has such a degree of collaboration.