Info/Law

The mechanics of submitting academic articles for publication in law journals has gotten some attention in the legal blogosphere lately, doubtless because the impending start of the new academic year traditionally brings with it the larger of the two annual “peaks” in the law review submission cycle. The law library at Emory Law School kicked off the discussion by posting a chart giving the contact information for the top 36 general-purpose law reviews (as measured by citation counts), as well as each journal’s suggested and maximum length for submissions. Dan Solove added some additional submission resources, with links directly to the submissions pages of a number of top journals. Interestingly, many of the top journals do not accept electronic submissions at all.

If you visit the web sites of those journals on Emory’s “top 36″ that permit electronic submissions, you will notice just how thoroughly Microsoft Word has trounced what once was, by a very wide margin, the predominant word processing tool in the legal community — WordPerfect. Only one journal (Wake Forest) even indicates that it will accept WordPerfect manuscripts at all. The journals that now rely on Berkeley’s ExpressO service to manage their incoming submissions, too, have given the field a distinct Microsoft tilt; as the ExpressO site warns authors:

“All of the 500+ law reviews in our pool accept manuscripts formatted in Microsoft Word. Authors choosing to submit in WordPerfect will have a smaller pool of law reviews from which to choose.”

Particularly for untenured faculty who might be afraid that submitting to “a smaller pool of law reviews” will yield a smaller shot at publication, the lesson seems particularly clear: to get ahead in legal academia, one must use Word, or at least a document system that exports tolerably good Word output. OpenOffice might do; TeX/LaTeX, which is ubiquitous on university campuses outside those small corners occupied by the law schools, clearly won’t.

Is there anything going on here other than the simple market inertia brought on by Microsoft Office being bundled with the PCs that law students purchased over the last decade or so? It’s hard to see a technical justification for the dominance of Word. Where journals attempt to justify their choices, the explanations ring a little hollow; witness, for example, the BC Law Review’s assertion that MS Word documents “are most easily opened” on editors’ PCs. Word documents are “easily opened” on PCs that have Word installed;^[1] on other computers, of course, they are opened with some difficulty, and much can be lost in the translation from Word to another format. Can Word documents really be more “easily opened” than documents saved in a vendor-independent, cross-platform format like ODF? The movement to promote creating and retaining data in non-proprietary formats is still in its infancy, but has earned some recognized successes around the world (and in the well-publicized example of the executive branch of the Massachusetts state government here in the U.S.).^[2] Perhaps in the future we might see support for alternative, non-proprietary formats added to the list of principles of the Open Access Law project?

For what it’s worth, here’s my breakdown on the top 36 journals as identified by Emory’s listing, and what I’ve been able to learn from their web sites concerning their support for non-Microsoft file formats. Of the 24 journals that accept submissions in electronic form (either directly or via ExpressO), seven require Word (I include Vanderbilt in this count, but see the caveat in the chart below), and twelve more express preferences (of varying force) for Word. Just four journals indicate that they will accept submissions in non-Word formats (and one of these four mentions only WordPerfect, another proprietary format, as an alternative.) (Note that PDF is technically a proprietary format, although backers of open formats would likely find PDF less objectionable than Word because the software tools necessary to create and edit PDF documents, unlike Word documents, are available free of charge for any platform.)