UND professors' law review research acknowledged in New York Times article

Kate Menzies

Document Type

News Article

Publication Date

11-22-2013

Campus Unit

College of Arts & Sciences

Abstract

Three professors from the University of North Dakota have blazed the path for addressing issues in the current law review system, and their work was recently mentioned in a New York Times article titled "The Lackluster Reviews that Lawyers Love to Hate."

Richard Wise, Doug Peters and Joe Miller, all of UND's Psychology department, set out to research the credibility of law reviews.

The professors argued that, since law reviews are the main sources of legal scholarship, they should not be left in the hands of law students to edit.

In the article, Wise asked "Would you want The New England Journal of Medicine to be edited by medical students?"

The answer is probably not due to the fact that students simply do not have the experience or expertise to critique law reviews.

The UND professors delved into the controversy of law reviews and discovered ways to make these reviews a more trustworthy source of information similar to other scholarly journals.

Wise, Peters and Miller composed a survey of the legal community's views on law reviews, compiling responses from an array of 2,000 law professors, lawyers, judges and student editors.

The survey was created to gather the opinions of those in the law field and discover ways to make law reviews a more credible source of information. Those surveyed revealed that the three kinds of changes that would be the most beneficial to the improvement of law reviews would be blind screening, peer review and more training for student editors.

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