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.