It is great to be involved in the blog. Thanks to Karen for including me!
I have been following the debate over electronic publication (or “embargo”) of history dissertations, with accompanying concerns about pirating of ideas and research.
Questions of protecting our original research, publication, and how best to publicize our work, are particularly complex in the enterprise of legal history. By definition, we operate in multiple fields simultaneously. This affects all aspects of our work, but none more completely than how best to reach audiences for our scholarship (not to mention to get tenure). I have been involved in books, articles in history journals, and most recently in an article for a law review, and have found myself wondering in each case how the venue affects the readership. I still believe that the book is the central form of scholarly achievement for most in our field, and am very much enjoying being a book series editor in legal history, but the virtues of other forms of publication loom large, for practical reasons as well as for those of scholarship.
For legal historians based in law schools, deans and many colleagues may equate success with law review publication. I have even been told by some that their deans have actively discouraged books, while touting law review articles as the safest track to tenure. And some noted legal historians have made careers primarily on the strength of such articles. Among graduate students in joint degree programs, by contrast, I have noticed a habit of downplaying the intellectual worth of law reviews. From my perspective, this is unwarranted, in large part because law remains the field where student-run publications actually dominate the market. We can all think of superb legal history research that has been published in law reviews. Remember Bob Gordon’s Critical Legal Histories?
A key question about publishing in law reviews, however, remains the one I began with: audience. Does legal history in law reviews languish in relative obscurity compared with non-legal journals and books? Do journals that are not explicitly targeted at historians actually get read by those we hope to reach?
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