Walter Hutchens’ Blog

A group of students at the University of Pennsylvania Law School seek to establish a new journal focused on Chinese legal issues, according to this announcement.

The journal is not yet formally recognized by the school, and it is not clear whether they intend for it to be an online or paper (and online) publication.

Interestingly, they contemplate a bilingual journal.

As a scholar of Chinese law I’d of course welcome a new journal from a top law school focused on the field. There are many, many international law reviews, but it seems the proposed Penn publication will be the only American law school journal focused on Chinese legal issues.

Existing journals that are closely related include the Columbia Journal of Asian Law (formerly the Journal of Chinese Law) and the University of Washington’s Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal. However, these outlets have obviously given themselves mandates broader that just Chinese law.

Certainly Chinese legal issues are important enough–and bountiful enough–to merit a prominent journal focused on them, and Penn’s stature would make their journal an attractive outlet.

But I am not sure how bountiful the supply of quality articles on Chinese law is. In the English-speaking world there are not many scholars of Chinese law.

There are particularly few on traditional law school faculties. There are perhaps 15 scholars of Chinese law in US and Canadian law schools. Only a few of them publish regularly. Those who do may have a preference to have their work published in more general or longer-established journals.

Because the new journal has broadened its scope to include Chinese language manuscripts and may be published only a couple of times a year, probably an adequate supply of articles can be obtained. But it may not be as easy as the students imagine.

The polymath, frenetic Judge Richard Posner wrote an interesting screed Against Law Reviews recently, arguing that the current publishing system for legal scholarship is bad in several respects but that we’re probably stuck with it.

If we are stuck with the current system, there are at least efforts afoot(-note?) to make things more tolerable. A group of prominent law school reviews issued this joint statement recently, announcing, in effect, that they want to reverse the trend of law review articles growing ever longer.

Both as a reader and as prospective writer of law review articles, a call for shorter articles sounds great to me; I applaud this effort.

However, I find some amusement in the spectacle of uber-elites holding hands in an effort to stop themselves from running long, tedious articles. Maybe there’s a 21-step program for them? Also, I wonder: are there anti-trust implications for this joint action? Won’t this action undercut competition in the marketplace for ideas?

That could be the subject of a long, tedious, overly-footnoted article.

Other commentary on the joint statement is here.