Reassessing Professor Hibbitts's Requiem for Law Reviews

The details vary from law review to law review, but typically, an accepted article is edited three times, once for technical compliance with the Bluebook manual of citation, once for substance and clarity, and again by a senior editor. Every citation is checked to confirm that it supports the proposition for which it is offered. The author sees the article at least twice during the process, once after the manuscript has been edited, and again at the galley or page proof stage. Next, the article is typeset (increasingly, this simply means that a word processing file submitted by the author and edited by the law review staff is run through a photo typesetting machine), plates are made, and the volume of the law review containing the article is printed.

The law review itself then usually takes care of order fulfillment for subscribers and special orders. Now, consider the typical electronic publishing process on the World Wide Web. This author is familiar with Web-based publishing, having organized and supervised one of the major Web servers on the Internet devoted to legal information. Practices vary from server to server, but the following description is typical.

An author, frequently also the owner of a Web page, takes a word processing file of an article, sometimes in the same stage of development that it would be submitted to a law review, sometimes in a much earlier stage of development. He reformats it by hand or by use of macros or scripts to transform word processing formatting codes into html codes. He may also add a hypertext- linked table of contents. The author then places the article on the Web server.

There is no acceptance or rejection process, and no third party editing.