By Tim McCarten '08
Features Editor

When Virginia Law Review recently revealed In Brief, its online companion, it joined the law journals at Yale, Harvard, Penn, and Michigan in a growing trend among the country’s leading law reviews to publish original scholarship on the Internet.

But since the Internet age dawned more than a decade ago, why did it take so long for the nation’s law journals to make this move?

Among the primary causes is that legal academic literature is most often controlled by law students. Although there are arguments as to the merits of whether this should be the case, it is beyond dispute that it has practical implications for the ability of law journals to adapt to changes in the marketplace.

Primary among these implications is the fact that law reviews’ editorial boards must deal with the problems inherent in annual turnover and short periods of tenure. As a consequence, when the publishing industry changed—as it did upon the advent of online publication—student-led journals have been comparatively slow to adapt. Thus, despite the fact that most of the current generation of law students is very comfortable with technology, student-published legal literature has only recently ventured onto the Internet in a manner comparable to other kinds of publications.

But now that a handful of law journals have begun branching out onto the Internet, it appears that many others will follow. According to Jim Zucker, Virginia Law Review’s Editor-in-Chief, his counterparts at the nations’ other leading law reviews are almost uniformly planning the near-term launch of an online companion to their print journals.

Although Zucker claims that the Law Review didn’t feel any pressure after the Yale Law Journal published the first online companion (The Pocket Part) in October 2005, he believes that past and current Law Review managing boards possessed a uniform sense that the future of legal scholarship is online. Among other advantages, these boards recognized that online companions can truncate the publication process, which may take as much as a year from the point of an article’s submission to its publication.

However, even once the board decided to construct an online companion, it took over a year of planning and development to publish In Brief. Publishing online, as the Virginia Law Review found, involves settling difficult questions as to the manner in which legal scholarship should proceed on the Internet. Indeed, other law journals that hope to establish an online companion are facing the very same questions. On this issue, however, there seems to be consensus among those involved with such publications that the Internet provides three basic routes for presenting scholarly content. These students simply differ on which is the proper approach.

First, online publications such as the Harvard Law Review Forum limit their web content to a simple extension of their printed pages. Material published in the Forum discusses articles that appeared in the current print issue of Harvard Law Review, and consists solely of brief, timely responses to those articles.

Second, and at the other end of the spectrum, is the legal blog. While no major law review has yet taken this route, law professors such as Yale’s Jack Balkin and UCLA’s Eugene Volokh advocate this approach. Indeed, other journals are known to be considering it. While legal blogs have the advantages of readership and speed of publication, many view this avenue as being insufficiently academic. As Virginia Law Review’s Technology Development Editor Chris Yeung says, the main problem with blogs is that they “consist of unpolished ideas” that don’t go through the standard editing and substantiation processes.

As an alternative to these two divergent approaches, Virginia Law Review has joined several other law reviews that have sought an intermediate route. Attempting to balance the speed with which a blog can disseminate information and the academic weight that a traditional article carries, Yeung says that In Brief is designed to publish “more polished ideas at a quicker speed.” Moreover, Zucker admits that publications like Virginia Law Review “can’t compete with blogs” while also maintaining the degree of quality for which the legal community values them. Rather, he contends that a more balanced approach is the wiser course.

This intermediate approach also allows journals to be flexible about the type of content they publish online. For example, while the content of Harvard’s Forum remains closely tied to its printed journal (the format of which appears largely the same), In Brief’s first issue features an essay by Professor Chris Sprigman with images, multimedia, and links to external sources. In this respect, Yeung believes that such additional creative opportunities will provide scholars with another incentive to publish their work in an online companion.

In the near term, Yeung says that In Brief will publish online once a month during the academic year and that it has already selected essays for the next few issues. For those issues, In Brief has solicited the help of professors to write the pieces that it will use. After that, however, Zucker and Yeung anticipate that In Brief’s editors will be able to select its content from a pool of essays that professors, UVA students, and practitioners submit. Indeed, after only two weeks online, Zucker reports that several authors have already submitted essays through the In Brief website.

So if the future of legal scholarship is online, what will happen to the traditional printed Law Review page? According to Zucker, the move online may make printed law reviews little more than “brand-name repositories” of scholarship that is accessible elsewhere. Even so, he believes that academic literature’s move to the Internet will only enhance the quality of legal scholarship.