CHRIS GEIDNER POSTS A DEFENSE OF STUDENT-EDITED LAW REVIEWS, and has links to quite a few other people’s thoughts on the subject.

Now is the wrong time to ask me what I think, as I’m bleary-eyed from adding footnotes and making changes in response to editorial suggestions from the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, to whom I’m supposed to return my edited piece shortly. (The worst thing about their suggestions by far is that they’re mostly good ones, meaning that I have to follow them. D’oh!) In general, I’m a fan of student-edited law reviews. They have their virtues and their vices, but I think that, overall, they help to keep legal scholarship from becoming as inbred as scholarship in some other disciplines becomes. I also find their close attention to footnoting tiresome and tedious when it’s applied to my pieces, but highly useful when it’s applied to other people’s. . . .