Let us tell the story of a suit against Match.com. In 2019, the Federal Trade Commission sued “Match Group, Inc. (Match), the owner of Match.com, Tinder, OKCupid, PlentyOfFish, and other dating sites, alleging that the company used fake love interest advertisements to trick hundreds of thousands of consumers into purchasing paid subscriptions on Match.com.” A separate class action lawsuit also alleged that “keeps thousands of inactive, fake and fraudulent profiles on its dating site to mislead customers about their chances of finding a mate.”
This isn’t an article about matchmaking for love. This is about matchmaking between journals and authors. And much of that matchmaking is done on a site called Scholastica.
Once upon a time, professors had to use the U.S. Postal Service to submit articles, cover letters, and resumes to as many journals as they wished. This was a lengthy, inefficient, and costly process. Eventually a digital platform called Express-O came on the market and provided a one-stop mechanism for submitting everything to one web site and then distributed the packet electronically (for a fee) to as many law reviews as the professor wished. Professors and their administrative assistants breathed a sigh of relief. It also made it much easier to flood hundreds of law reviews with submissions with very little effort.
Eventually, law reviews embraced electronic submission as their preferred or exclusive method of submission. The journals’ electronic mailboxes filled up while their physical mailboxes emptied out. For a variety of reasons, over the past 12 or so years, journals began including Scholastica as an additional option, and Express-O went out of business in 2021.
Today some law journals have their own individual submission portals with various idiosyncratic requirements about format, anonymization, abstracts, tables of contents, AI use, etc. Some allow direct submission via email. Most law reviews rely on Scholastica for their exclusive or preferred submission portal. The law reviews then respond to the authors with an eventual acceptance or rejection through the platform and notify Scholastica when they are “open” for submissions and when they are “closed” for the season or academic year. Lucky professors often leverage the first acceptance by asking for a substantial deadline to respond and contacting higher-ranked journals that have not yet responded for an expedited decision before the initial deadline. Scholastica, like Express-O before it, held forth the promise of a single, relatively efficient (but not cheap) method of sending up a draft law review article and accompanying materials to as many journals on the platform at one time, receive one or more acceptances, and publish with the “best” (highest-ranked) journal to make an offer.
That promise is increasingly in jeopardy. Sure, some professors continue to play the game successfully, but it’s a radically smaller group in recent submission cycles. Even famous-named folks are having trouble placing articles in the top 30 law reviews. And worse, the problem of overwhelmed law review editors seems to have trickled down to the law reviews at the lower end of the rankings. In short, many folks have faced more than two article submission seasons this year without any placements.
There are more law review articles than ever before. For any individual article, cost is the only real deterrent to submitting to all journals and law reviews where there is a chance of being accepted (for example, presumably authors don’t submit an environmental law article to a specialty tax journal). Some higher-end journals suggest they are screening over 3,000 articles (while only having a max of 20 slots for those articles). Those are bad odds.
Part of the problem is also AI. I’ve written about law review editor use of AI screens before. Depending on the nature of the backlog, the problem promises to get worse.
What exactly are we law professors getting for our (or our institution’s) money? And how do we cope with a system where we have to hit “submit” without knowing when or even if a journal will ever consider an article on the merits, i.e., actually read it?
Submitting to a law review in Scholastica that signals it is “open” doesn’t tell much information. When journals are open, that could mean they are fully open or just need to fill one or two slots. Sometimes the journal is actually full and hasn’t yet submitted that information to Scholastica. The authors do not know, which means they could be paying for a very low or zero payoff lottery ticket.
If a journal signals “open,” there may be no guarantee it is really open. What incentives do journals that are closed have to signal closed on Scholastica after they are filled? In other words, is there any penalty for a journal signaling open when it isn’t, causing authors to submit to the journal in error? If not, are authors paying a fee for phantom open journals?
Scholastica seems to recognize this: “One of the most frustrating experiences for an author is to send their article to a law review only to find out that the editors are no longer reviewing submissions.” At $7.35 per submission, it can add up.
Other data that would perhaps allow authors to gauge their risk is also not available. What’s the acceptance rate of the journal over time?
I worry, much like in the Match.com case, the love for our articles may be DOA, yet we’re paying for submitting the article to the grave. Scholastica could create greater information for law review submissions, greater transparency, and all those good things, but I wonder if it has an incentive to do it if it costs them submission fees.
Scholastica, if you’re listening:
1. Make the journals disclose any screening that isn’t based on scholarly content. AI screens ought to be disclosed. Should authors not rush to send our drafts that are timely until we make it pretty and not falsely signal AI?
2. Make Scholastica like digitized parking stalls. Show how many slots are available so that authors can make decisions to risk trying to place their articles there or look for greener pastures.
3. Make the number of submissions to that journal known as well. If the journal has 5,000 submissions, authors can surmise they aren’t going to read all of those. In an ideal world, law reviews would disclose what proxies they use (psst … some of the data shows exactly what we all suspect)
For everyone else (including the FTC and state AGs):
1. It’s time to think about how to inject more competition into the process to ensure higher-quality and less-costly ways to submit scholarship for publication. Right now, we have a high-priced inefficient system and a separate set of individual submissions for many of the most highly ranked journals.
2. It’s also time for more scrutiny of the limited and potentially misleading disclosures by Scholastica and the journals themselves.
3. I would love a lot more data than that, but I don’t really think that’s Scholastica’s job. For example, if a law review has almost never accepted a law review article from someone not at a T10 school (or at least from there), should we continue to waste time and money submitting there to feed their anti-intellectual screening mechanisms and elitism?
4. And in a side note to law professors: it also might be a good time to have a discussion about the purpose of legal scholarship. I always thought it was to better humanity through illumination — in law, that is based upon understanding of the literature that came before us and improving upon it (or rejecting it) in a thoughtful and transparent manner. I could be wrong. Maybe it’s even time for a random submission lottery and a “Hunger Games”-style tournament to replace reprints from highly ranked journals as trophies and digital downloads as their modern equivalent.
LawProfBlawg is an anonymous law professor. Follow him on X/Twitter/whatever (@lawprofblawg). He’s also on BlueSky, Mastodon, and Threads depending on his mood. Email him at lawprofblawg@gmail.com. The views of this blog post do not represent the views of his employer, his employer’s government, his Dean, his colleagues, or his family.
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