Ok, I admit that the first time that I sent out an article I requested an expedited review, I ultimately turned down for the original offer. I will admit that I did that not out of a sense of gaming, but out of naivete. I received my first offer (Iowa), and was told to "call all the law reviews above Iowa based on the 'peer review' column in USNWR and ask for expedited review." I did that, and the only offer that resulted in was the school right next to Iowa. So, in effect, the offers were identical. The publication schedule was identical, I wasn't going to be lead author on either one, etc. I went with the original offer out of some sense of loyalty to the review that chose me first. Now, I realize that if I am going to play the expediting game, I should not call reviews that are virtually identical to the original offer (or even marginally more prestigious).
However, I think there is a contrarian view here -- if you are viewing offers as mere bargaining chips. Say you have an offer from #25 school. You ask for an expedited review from #1 to #24 and receive an offer from #24. What have you gained? Plenty. You now have an excuse to call schools #1 to #23 again ("I just wanted to give you an update on where I am. I now have offers from #25 and #24.) Also, you may get a new deadline. If the #25 offer is running out, but you know that the expediting schools don't have time to meet the deadline, the #24 offer will start the clock again.
What insanity!

I think expediting is an interesting thing. I certainly think it is ethical to use lower offers to get higher offers--if the lower journal wanted to disallow expediting they could give you 1 minute to decide.
But, in the situation where an author expedites to a slightly higher (or substantially equal) journal, I think the author is under an obligation to say: I have a offer with X and will only go with your journal if you do Y (e.g., publish my article as your lead article, etc).
That said, I think many authors have not thought of this (so I understand Prof. Hunt's situation), so I am glad y'all are talking about it!
Thanks!

At a top law review, I won't bother to read an expedite unless the author explicitly agrees that they will not accept the original offer if we give them one. Otherwise, the author is usually trying to simply use the slightly higher-ranked journals to extend their time and "game up" to the top journals. This is basically unacceptable to everyone involved. Please remember, most of all, that we are simply law students. We have class, wives, husbands, children, extracurriculars, and generally lives outside of this. When you send something to us on a 24-48 hour expedite and we drop EVERYTHING to read it, you should be serious about what you are doing. It not only intrudes into our regular schedule of article reading (which is, of course, hundreds of pages a week). But it also interferes with everything else we have going on. If you are ever wondering why you some law review editors aren't showing up to class prepared or enthusiastic (see your previous posting on blind grading), a lot of it has to do with this process.

Responding to Professor Hurt's post, why does anyone care about being the "lead author," in the sense of being the first article in the issue? Articles are not formally ordered by (student perceived) merit in any given issue or volume, and in any event unless you are Page 1 of Issue 1, no one will be able to tell later (Westlaw and Lexis don't disclose that the article beginning on page 552 was the first in that issue).

And lawyers wonder why the general public questions their ethics? Look who we learn them from? :) No one should ever accuse academia of being less ruthless than the corporate world.

Seriously, I think lower journals should condition their offers on 18 hours acceptance. If that's not enough time to shop the submission around, well, too bad. There are other things lower ranked journals could do to attract better caliber articles. Like the crazy notion of allowing authors to retain copyright.

Lower ranked journals have a choice: play this silly game and continue to lose articles to higher ranked journals, or buck the system and offer true innovation.

Of course, I could be full of it...

To follow up on Christine's post, I think that the normal practice (at least, my practice) isn't to expedite from #55 to #54.

On the other hand -- and this was my experience -- every expedite can help, in that it (1) buys time, and (2) sends a signal that your article is "hot."

So, for a past article (changing the number slightly), I got an initial offer from #100. I expedited up the ladder. I got an offer from #55. I re-expedited.

Then I got an offer from #54 (based on the original expedite, from #100). At that point, I re-re-expedited -- i.e., I called Harvard, Yale, etc with news of my new #54 offer. I don't know that I would have accepted #54 (thankfully, the point was eventually mooted by a substantially better offer). But I was happy to take the extra day or two of deadline flexibility.

Similarly, a person asked me earlier this season about an offer. He received a quick-deadline offer (less than a week) from a lower-end journal. I suggested that he might try fishing for an offer from peer journals for the sole purpose of re-expediting -- i.e., try to get an offer with the more traditional (for lower end journals) 2-week deadline. I suggested that even if that meant turning down an offer from short-deadline #140 if he got a 2-week offer from #150, that would be a gain, because he would then have 2 weeks to try to work his way up the ladder (rather than the unworkable deadline that #140 gave him) and the difference between 140 and 150 is pretty minimal.

To be fair to us newbies at the process, there is some ambiguity in rating specialty law reviews vs. general law reviews. My article has been accepted at a top 10 specialty law review and I have sought expedites from a lot of general law reviews. I'm not 100% sure I would accept offers from all of them, because I don't know whether they are better than my original offer. In an ideal world, I wouldn't do this, but as far as I know there is no "right" answer here. I've asked a mentor for advice, but haven't heard back. So, for now, I erred on the side of over-expediting.

I apologize to the poor editors I may have burdened.

Kaimi,
Doesn't it seem wrong, though, that you would make #54 read the article only to tell them no? Why take #55 over #54 anyway?

The #54 was already reading it (as was everyone else) because we had earlier expedited from #100.

I guess there's a possibility that one should withdraw from immediate peer journals on receiving a first expedite. I haven't seen that position argued. However, I don't know that that would be the best result. #54 had a serious shot at acceptance -- had I been forced to decide between the two, it would have been close. I didn't have to decide, because as it was, I eventually got a higher offer that made all the earlier offers moot.

Re: clerk's situation. While an apology is nice, I wonder if law reviews will create some institutional/cross-institutional knowledge base. If an author is known to have expedited to a school and taken the original offer, I think schools should refuse to read expedites unless that author tells the expediting school they will take the expediting school's offer over the original.

Kaimi,

It makes sense to me if #54 was already reading it based on an earlier expedite. My impression is that authors by and large do not withdraw pieces they have accepted offers on. I object to authors re-expediting to #54 based on the additional offer from #55.

My law review has an institutional blacklist for authors that have abused the process. I'm not sure how long this thing dates back, but I think it can have legitimate ramifications on an author's ability to publish. Then again, it takes obvious gaming and abuse to get a spot on the blacklist (rather than simply being disfavored by the current board and maybe the following 1 or 2). If an author appears to have gamed the system, we will call them out on it. A lot of the time, they don't even really know what they're doing. It's pretty easy to tell the difference between the ones who do it on purpose and the ones who do it inadvertantly. Unfortunately, I think there is a lot of bad advice out there about expedites and the whole process. I think that legal academia breeds the whole gaming concept and encourages other professors--who would otherwise know better and not do it on purpose--to abuse the process. And once again, it simply comes down to remembering we're not the big, bad law review. We're a bunch of students who have stepped in for a year to a process that is foreign to us. While we do the best job we can, many of the prosepctive authors make the process much more hellish than it should be.

Just to add one more point. Until I read this post, it had never occurred to me that over-expediting might be an ethical problem. I tried to minimize doing it out of courtesy, but didn't fully think this through. I guess the reason is, as a former editor from a top ten specialty journal, I saw this stuff go on all the time. I thought it was just "part of the process." In the future, I will definitely try to have my decision hierarchy in place before requesting expedites.

I would, however, appreciate anyone who can add insight into the rankings of specialty (especially some less regarded specialties) vs. general law reviews.

I don't know how much of a problem this is for us. I do know that some people try to "game" the system. I have never felt like I'm being "gamed" though.

From my point of view, the whole point of an expedite is to work as a non-school filter. I care almost nothing about where the expedite is from; all we use them for is to move articles from the "read at our leisure" pile to a "read more quickly" pile. Sometimes expedited articles don't get read; this is because nobody here finds the first page really eye-catching. A few days before your expedite deadline, someone in the office will take a closer look, and if they think that we need to push the article through to a read, it'll happen. Otherwise it gets rejected.

If you expedite in waves, though, it may work against you. Tell us when you have an expedite, even if your expedite is from the Mesopotamian Journal of Law and Earwax. It is much easier for us to read your article with a two week lag time than two days; two days, and you risk us saying, "This article may be interesting, but we're just not going to force everyone to read it. Mesopotamia can have it."

staging (considering offer from a peer journal with a longer deadline to re-expedite to higher ranked schools) does not offend me as an articles editor because the author will assumedly accept my offer if he/she does not receive a better offer.

the more unethical expedite conduct involves using an offer to expedite up when the author has no intention of accepting that offer if she does not receive a better offer. this is the type of author that will continue to seek extensions, only to withdraw their article at the end of the expedite period without ever receiving another article.

AE raises an interesting question -- is it ever ethical to send a submission to the Mesopotamian Journal of Law and Earwax for the _sole purpose_ of trying to use them as bait to get an offer from Michigan? I don't know the answer to this myself; I suspect that there's a divide in opinions.

If law review editors wanted to do so, they could coordinate information (e.g., a password-encrypted website where they share information on who expedited and when) to prevent "re-expediting." This sort of coordination is feasible: editors recently coordinated their effort to encourage shorter articles; the number of law reviews is small enough that coordination is feasible; and it's in the interest of all law reviews to do this.

kaimi -- the answer should be simple (well, at least from a student perspective!). do not submit an article to a journal from which you would not accept a publication offer. or, at the very least, do not wait the entire expedite period (plus extensions) before deciding the journal is beneath you. this is an immense waste of time for the editors.

Two comments:

I once received a publication offer in which the editor said (as I recall), "We have one slot available and have made multiple offers. The first author to call and accept will receive the slot." Is this common? Other similar stories?

2. Not too long ago, I read an article (Green Bag?) comparing/contrasting manuscript submissions with judicial clerkship applications. How many of us would have the audacity to try to "trade up" a clerkship offer? So why do we act differently when it comes to manuscript submissions? Is it because we feel that it's the only way to convince student editors at "better" journals to read our work? Would the process be more "fair" if the review process was truly "blind"?

There is the problem of getting the top journals to read the article without an expedite. Do top journals read anything not on expedite? I'm curious what strategies have worked for people to get a top journal to read an article without an expedite.

Scott Moss' suggestion would not solve the problem of authors expediting from journals and then choosing that journal to publish in. The articles editors know the journal the author is expediting from, but they just wrongly assume the author is not making them read the article for no reason.

Just to add a data point:

--Blacklists do exist for authors who expedite and then accept the offer from the journal they expedited from.

--Loyalty to the one who asked you first is only one side of it--what about loyalty to the people who actually put in extra work and extra time AT YOUR REQUEST? If you ask me, those are the people who just showed you how hard they're willing to work for you.

--Editors do read non-expedite stuff. Something from Mesopotamia L. Rev. won't be read over a non-expedite article with an interesting title and/or a well known author and/or a well known law school. Unless the expedite is from a top-25 journal, it won't matter that much.

tim--

Just a comment re: clerkships & law review submissions. One difference is that we're not Article III judges. We're 2Ls.

In response to tim, it is common (or at least it used to be common) to try to leverage "lesser"-ranking clerkship offers to get a better one, or at least a decision in a timely manner. It's just the name of the game; law is a sport obsessed with rankings (see the recent excitement over SSRN download rankings and the like), and any way that law students or law profs can rise on a list, they will find a way to do so. Whether this prestige-obsession is a good thing is an entirely different matter.

A very interesting discussion! Here are my two cents.

I've played the game numerous times in the past 10 years. Here are my rules.

1. I only submit in the first place to schools where I would be happy, or at least not unhappy, to publish. This has ranged from the top 45 reviews to the top 30, depending on the article and where I have been in my career. (I submit to fewer reviews theses days than I did early in my career. What the "top 30" are, of course, is a matter of interpretation.) If number 32 or 29 makes me an offer, I try to expedite upwards. But, if that fails, then I accept the offer from number 32 or 29. I have never declined an offer in that circumstance.

2. I try to give the first school that makes me an offer some benefit for doing so. Thus, if number 29 makes me an offer, I am not going to expedite up to number 28 or 27. My logic is that the school who has done so has made an investment in the piece by reading it, evaluating it, and making an offer. They should get something in return.

3. In return for 1 and 2, I expect the school that makes the first offer to give me a reasonable amount of time to shop the article to other places -- 7 days. If, say, number 29 makes me an offer with a 48 or 72 hour deadline, I "threaten" to seek expedites at schools ranked at or even slightly below the school making the "exploding" offer. I then tell the school that I will withdraw the article from, say, all schools ranked 22 and below if they give me 7 days to shop it at 21 and above. My pitch to the schools is that this is a win win. I get 7 days, and they get an assurance that I will withdraw from some reviews that I would marginally prefer to theirs.

This strategy has always worked for me in those cases where schools have made offers with short fuses. I have fended off offers with 72 hour fuses from a couple of schools this way, turning them into 7 day fuses. In one case I "leveraged" into a top 8 placement. In another, I was not able to leverage up, but was still happy with the initial offer and accepted it.

4. Note that things change if the initial offer is from a top 15 or so school. If, say, Duke makes me a 72 hour offer, as once happened, I'd be happy enough with that that I would see no reason to threaten to go "sideways" to other schools ranked at that level as a way of negotiating an extension. Plus, the chance of convincing those other schools to publish my piece would be lower than, say, the chance of convincing schools ranked 29-25. So, my threat to "walk" would be less credible. In this circumstance I just get on the phone and start calling places, hoping that they have by happenstance already started reviewing the piece. In this case a journal did, so I traded up, though I would have been very happy with Duke.

5. In my experience (15 or so articles sent out to reviews in the last 10 years) most reviews make a reasonable offer in the first place, e.g., 7 days, 10 days, or even 14 days.

6. As for staging, I have never done it, though I would if my first offer were, from, say, number 60. But, as noted above, I don't submit to more than about 30 these days; if the piece doesn't get picked up I'll just wait until the next cycle and write something else in the meantime. If I get an offer from, say, North Carolina or Illinois, I am very happy to call Harvard and seek an expedite. (And, the people at Harvard are always very courteous!) If I wait for an offer from, say, Georgetown, I might end up "waiting" too long, and never get said offer, thereby losing the chance to seek any expedited review from the very top reviews. And, of course, I am happy to publish with North Carolina.

7. One last point. Given principles 1 and 2, I submit to very few reviews, maybe 17 or 18, in the fall, knowing that many reviews may already be filled. I don't want to get an offer from number 30 only to find out that most of the top 15 have filled their volumes, so I am forced to accept the first offer with no meaningful chance of expedite. So, I try to finish an article over the summer and send it out in the fall to 18 places. It usually does not get picked up. So, I work more on it, and send it out in the Spring again.

You can call these "Meese's Rules," though I suspect many people follow them.