Although it has been seemingly beaten to death in other quarters, I too have my own perspective on the nature of student-editing and how it affects legal scholarship.

There seems to me a big hole in how these commentators [see, I am in article mode] are approaching the student-review problem, and it mirrors the hole I see in many law review articles. I am constantly confronted with areas of legal scholarship that have far more complex and advanced counterparts in other disciplines. It's not that student editors don't do a good job in checking legal authority or finding authority (legal, of course) to support a writer's argument -- they do. However, student editors are largely inequipped to provide writers with a perspective on how the article fits in the field, especially in more theoretical or cross-disciplinary areas. Recently I have seen far too many law review articles that replicate work done by political scientists in the 1960s. Unfortunately, this is all too commonplace because of the dependence of editors and writers (i.e., professors) on Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis as virtually the sole source of research for their articles (and, of course, the arrogance of many lawyers that think that academics who haven't been legally trained are incapable of analyzing a problem that touches upon the law in some way).

On the other hand, as others have argued, student-editing helps keep legal scholarship from becoming mired by being more open to more radical thought that doesn't quite conform to the status quo. In some respects, that's true. However, student editors are just as likely as the writer's peers to become seduced by big-name writers. Of course, those famous professors may well be famous for good reason. Unfortunately, some have acquired fame simply by being prolific writers; not all of their work actually advances the scholarship.

This, of course, is another problem. Student editors often mistake non-preemption as an equivalent of advance. Article non-preemption should not be the sine qua non of publication, but rather, progress in scholarship. Often they do correspond. However, student editors usually are not discerning enough to sort out what hasn't been covered and what is truly important.

Finally, the real problem I see with the law review model is that it has enabled the professoriate to become lazy. Law professors know law reviews won't publish until every source is checked and every assertion supported. Many use the law review process as a replacement for well thought-out and executed research. This attitude causes some of the problems above. Relying on student work means that lazy professors are less likely to discover that their work is repetitious or simply unimportant. Of course, many law professors would be aghast at such a suggestion (and surely they are competent and diligent researchers). Unfortunately, they haven't seen the drivel produced by some of their less competent colleagues I've had the pleasure to read recently.