My friend and colleague John Lande just posted a musing about law review reprints. John notes that he misses law review reprints only because he now receives no personalized notes from reprints’ authors.
John did not need to rehearse the reasons for reprints’ relatively recent demise. He didn’t need to. These reasons are well understood and almost entirely valid—reprints are astonishingly expensive, they’re wasteful, they are unsearchable, their mailing is bad for the environment, they are un-cut-and-past-able, they take up precious physical space, and they’re unnecessary in a digital age.
I write separately, as though I were deciding whether to write a concurrence or a dissent, to distance myself from this last of the views on law review reprints.
My academic beef, or non-meat-equivalent-thereof, is with the last of the reasons for the demise of the law review reprint—the assertion that, in the digital age, reprints serve no role other than decoration. For me at least, law review reprints provide at least three benefits un-conferred by their digital pseudo-equivalents:
- Law review reprints are tactile. I can hold them in my hands and know that I, or some colleague or friend, has labored in its creation. And the knowing has a feel. A real-world existence, even if a fleeting one.
- Law review reprints demand time for consumption. Draw an analogy here to the slow food and slow eating movement. One cannot simply jump to the section one intends to cite for some proposition in one’s own scholarship. (Don’t even try to feign that you would never do such a thing.) One instead must at a bare minimum skim the article, if one is to derive benefit from it.
- The receipt of law review reprints triggers the reciprocity principle—to my benefit. Few psychological phenomena are better studied or have appeared across a broader swath of cultures and contexts than the reciprocity principle. “This person gave me something. I owe them something.” And in this case, the something I am triggered to believe I owe them is to read, or at least skim, the law review article I now hold in my hands. Never mind that they may never know that I read it (although I try to send nice congratulatory notes after I have done so), and never mind that I might not have necessarily chosen to spend part of my limited time on this planet reading a law review article on topic X, about which I have not until this moment cared much at all. I owe them one. And so I read it, this thing that I likely never would otherwise have read. And sometimes, maybe even often, I’m grateful that I did. And the corollary is that I have never felt this slightest guilt in failing to read something whose existence is purely digital, whose existence I learned of purely digitally. Law review reprints clutter my desk until I read them. Their digital cousins clutter nothing in my physical realm or in my consciousness.
Do these positive attributes of law review reprints outweigh their direct and indirect costs? Perhaps not. I don’t know. Hence the concur-or-dissent quandary. But I doubt that I am alone in having derived, even if for only half an hour, benefits from the reprints of yore.
If you are an ADR author and you don’t know what to do with the meager number of reprints you have received, feel free to send one my way. I will almost certainly read it, and I will almost certainly be grateful that I did.
Michael Moffitt