The Future of Legal Scholarship and Scholarly Communication: Publication in the Age of Cyberspace

There is a saying in the personal computer trade: "You can have it faster, cheaper, better--pick any two." This axiom comes to mind when confronting how technology is redefining the publication process, more rapidly than we may realize. These changes may well make academic publication faster and cheaper. But given some of the tradeoffs involved, it is less clear that these changes always make publication better, as well. In a recent paper (distributed electronically, in exemplification of the trends it discusses), Professor Bernard Hibbitts examines the revolutionary potential of new technology for revising--indeed, supplanting--what has been one of the most tradition-bound of scholarly endeavors: the law review. In Part I of this paper, I will review the essentials of Hibbitts's discussion, and his argument that electronic self-publication of legal scholarship soon will--and should--replace the edited, printed law review as we know it today. In Part II, I apply sociological analysis to explore some special features of the audience for and functions of legal scholarship. I will build upon this discussion in Part III, which explains why legal scholarship is a poor candidate for electronic self-publication, and why self-publication is a poor use of the Internet's potential for scholarly communication. In the concluding Part IV, I outline some counter-proposals for improving legal scholarship and scholarly communication in light of new dissemination technologies.