Behind the Scenes at Harvard Law Review

There's a lot to unpack with over 2,200 pages of internal memos from the decision-making process now released. Here are details on what they show.

This is the first part in a series of posts on these memos and deals with the first 150 or approximately the first 800 pages of the memo PDF file.

Background

The law review decision process is not traditionally transparent. Some scholars with relationships with certain institutions may have insight on where their articles will place, but most people approach the process like shooting buckshot and looking for successful hits. Many submit their articles to ten or more journals at once. This is vastly different from the peer-review process where journals generally only will review articles submitted to one journal at a time.

For those without experience in a law review, the hierarchical process of review may be a foreign concept. Most, if not all reviews go through several reads of articles before decisions are made. The turnaround on acceptances tends to be quick though in weeks rather than the months or more before a response is sent out for most peer review pieces. Even for those who worked on a law review at a different institution, the Harvard Law Review process is probably opaque at best. But no longer.

The Washington Free Beacon posted over 2,200 pages of internal Harvard Law Review memos that showcase the internal review process. The Beacon’s focus in its analysis was on the role of DEI and race-conscious rubric. That is not the focus of this article. Instead, my goal is to highlight insights and trends in the decision making process that were not previously shared with the public.

This is the first in a series of articles I’ll have dissecting various dimensions of these memos. The main thrusts are what the individual memos say, what were the most common article topics in the submissions, what were the most common article critiques, what the reviewers decided to do with each memo they reviewed, and then clustering the decisions based on issue areas.

Disclaimer

I, like others, have thought deeply about how to approach these memos. Most importantly, they were written by people who did not intend this material to be disclosed. This is akin to dumps of internal law firm e-mails that shared information certain individuals did not intend to be disclosed but once disclosed, cannot be hidden again. This information is out there for anyone to organize and study.

There are real people involved though and so the implications are not that simple as the consequences of these released memos will likely have direct impact on the law review staff, especially those who made pointed comments that they did not foresee would later be released to the public. Suffice it to say, the ramifications of this released information may have real world consequences for those involved.

Since these are now publicly accessible and are a treasure trove for researchers, I tracked several areas that I provide below. The top section contains several pieces of information: (1) article title, (2) recommendation (on continuing review or not), (3) issue area of the article (4) the three main points made by the reviewer, (5) and three main critiques in the review using language from the review itself. I did not include the reviewers’ names in this section.

Here are article topics that came up most frequently in the first set of memos which had clearly identifiable issue areas.

While Constitutional Law, Criminal Law, and Corporate Law are the top three topics, if you combine Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure, that then becomes the largest bucket. I break the data down in other ways below the discussion of the individual memos.

As I am interested in several other pieces of information including where these articles finally placed in journals, I captured that information to the extent it is available in a table at the bottom including the name of the article author and the reviewer on each memo. I share this so others looking to research these memos do not have to reinvent the wheel. The bottom line here is that anything written in these reviews should be taken with a grain of salt since although it is probably more candid than we would get otherwise, it was said without the intention of disclosure.

In terms of breaking down these memos, I used NLP software in Python to split the memos into individual files and then to parse the sentences. AI was used to pull salient quotes, and NLP was used to organize the topics in each article. I additionally performed research into the background components of each article that are provided in the bottom table.

Breaking Down the Memos

Article: "On the Racial Disparities in Criminal Law"

o Recommendation: Do not proceed to M-Read

o Issue Area: Criminal law / racial justice

o Reviewer’s Main Points:

1. Creative and nuanced thesis.

2. Disorganized and repetitive structure.

3. Fails to engage key data and counterarguments.

o Critique-Based Observations:

• “The organization of the Article was also flawed. Occasionally, the Article did not follow its self-imposed roadmap... and spent a significant amount of time discussing social science theories that were not subsequently relevant.”