The Law Review Match

A plain-English summary of my new paper with Jake Arft-Guatelli (from Claude)

Jake Arft-Guatelli and I have a new working paper, The Law Review Match (also on SSRN), about fixing the law review submission process. The one-sentence summary: the twice-yearly scramble of mass submissions, expedite requests, and letterhead-based article selection is a textbook case of a congested market, and we could fix it without overhauling anything else about law reviews — keep student editors, keep multiple submission, keep fast timelines — by borrowing the matching-market tools that rescued medical residencies and public school admissions: a centralized clearinghouse running a deferred-acceptance algorithm.

The Problem

If you have never submitted to a law review, the process is hard to believe. Twice a year, in February and August, legal scholars submit their manuscripts to dozens of journals simultaneously — student-run law reviews receive thousands of submissions per cycle (Harvard Law Review alone received over 3,000 in 2024). No student editorial board can meaningfully read that volume on the timelines involved, so editors triage using proxies: author credentials, institutional letterhead, and — most importantly — whether some other journal has already made an offer.

That last proxy is the engine of the whole dysfunction. When an author receives an offer from a journal, the rational next move is not to celebrate — it’s to immediately ask every higher-ranked journal for an “expedited” decision before the offer expires, hoping to trade up. This is the offer-and-expedite game, and everyone has to play it or fall behind. The consequences:

• Editors are rushed. Decisions that deserve weeks get made in hours, under deadlines set by competing journals’ offers rather than by any review schedule.
• Labor is distributed inequitably. Lower-ranked journals do the real screening work, and higher-ranked journals free-ride on their offers as a quality signal. Authors treat lower-ranked journals as stepping stones, in a way that ultimately hurts everyone.
• Merit takes a back seat. When you can’t read everything, letterhead substitutes for judgment.
• Enormous quantities of donated student labor are wasted — not on editing or evaluating scholarship, but on triaging a broken bargaining game.

A key point we push in the paper: this is not an indictment of student editors, which is where most critiques of the system aim. Any reviewing body — students, faculty, judges — asked to evaluate thousands of manuscripts in a few weeks, under interruption from expedite deadlines, would reach for the same proxies. The problem is the conditions of review, not the reviewers. That misdiagnosis matters, because reforms that target the people (peer review! faculty control!) leave the broken market intact.

Why Past Reforms Fall Short

In the paper we argue that a successful redesign has to satisfy three criteria: (1) it must end — not just inconvenience — the incentive to expedite; (2) it must distribute editorial labor equitably and protect real time for review; and (3) it must be incentive-compatible, meaning no participant is asked to act against their own interest once the system is adopted. Measured against those criteria, the reforms that have circulated for decades each run into trouble — often less on the merits than on the realities of adoption:

• Peer review is the academic gold standard for a reason, and paired with exclusive submission it would kill the expedite game outright. There is a real case that it is the right long-run answer for legal scholarship. The honest difficulty is that it demands a wholesale transformation: law professors taking on a large new refereeing burden, coordination across hundreds of journals, and acceptance of much longer publication timelines. That is a heavy lift that the legal academy has debated for decades without ever executing — so a reform whose success requires it is a reform that may never arrive.
• Exploding offers — take it or leave it in hours — do block expediting, but they compress editors’ timelines rather than protecting them. And we’ve run this experiment: when lower-ranked journals used exploding offers to stop being poached, the elite journals organized against the practice and killed it in 2011.
• Increased faculty involvement just changes who reviews, not the conditions of review. A faculty selector facing thousands of submissions on expedite timelines inherits the exact same problems.

This is what draws us to the match: it is the rare reform that fixes the underlying incentive structure while leaving nearly everything else about law reviews exactly as it is. And, importantly, it is not a rival to peer review — the match is fully compatible with it, and arguably its best on-ramp (more on that below).

The Fix: A Match

Here is the thing — this exact market failure has been solved before, twice, famously. Medical residencies in the 1950s and New York City public school admissions in the 2000s both suffered from the same disease: congestion, unraveling timelines, strategic gamesmanship, and participants forced into rushed decisions. Both were cured by a centralized clearinghouse running a deferred-acceptance (Gale-Shapley) matching algorithm — work that won Al Roth and Lloyd Shapley the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics.

The mechanics are simple. Authors submit a ranked list of journals; journals submit a ranked list of manuscripts (plus how many slots they have). The algorithm then runs in rounds: each manuscript “proposes” to its top-ranked journal; journals tentatively hold their favorite proposals up to their quota and reject the rest; rejected manuscripts propose to their next choice; repeat until nothing changes. Every tentative match then becomes final and binding.

The output has two properties that matter enormously here:

1. Stability. When the algorithm finishes, there is no author-journal pair who would both rather be matched with each other than with their assigned match. Nobody is left thinking a better deal was available.
2. Strategy-proofness for authors. Under author-proposing deferred acceptance, truthfully ranking journals is a dominant strategy. No amount of gamesmanship — strategic submission, bluffing, offer-shopping — can beat simply listing your honest preferences. The expedite game isn’t banned; it’s rendered pointless.

And for editors, the payoff is the thing the current system never gives them: a protected review period — at least three uninterrupted weeks under our proposed timeline — with no rolling offers, no expedite requests, and no pressure to decide in hours what deserves weeks.

Some Details Lawyers Will Ask About

Balanced issues. A natural objection: what if a journal gets matched with six tax articles? Journals legitimately care about publishing a balanced issue. The paper adapts a tool from the school choice literature (used there for things like neighborhood priority and desegregation goals): type-specific quotas. Each journal submits, alongside its overall quota, caps by article type — say, at most two tax and three constitutional law pieces — and the clearinghouse enforces the caps automatically inside the algorithm. Authors tag their manuscript with up to three subject-area types at submission. The theory here is worked out (thanks to results by Atila Abdulkadiroğlu on college admissions with quotas): the stability and strategy-proofness properties survive. Specialty journals fit naturally too — their quota vector just puts all slots in one type.

A concrete timeline. We propose a full cycle keyed to match day (call it T): registration closes 38+ days out; submissions run from T-38 to T-24; then a protected review period from T-24 to T-3; rankings are due at T-1; the algorithm runs on match day; and a cleanup phase handles unmatched articles and unfilled slots. Notice how little changes from the current calendar — two cycles a year, weeks (not years) from submission to decision, students making the selections. Three things worth highlighting. First, submissions would be blind — authors redact identifying information, which is standard everywhere else in the academy and which the current credential-driven system makes impossible. Second, clarifying questions between editors and authors flow through the platform anonymously, so blind review survives contact with the editing process. Third, the timeline includes an optional peer review track running in parallel with the editors’ review period: registered faculty reviewers get matched to manuscripts by subject area, and their reports land with the student editors before rankings are due. If you (like at least one of us) think peer review is where legal scholarship should eventually end up, this is the realistic path there — a centralized platform makes organized peer review possible in a way that thousands of scattered simultaneous submissions never could, and lets it grow incrementally rather than arriving via a big bang that never comes.

Who resists, and how do you get adoption? The honest answer is that top journals benefit from the status quo — they free-ride on lower-ranked journals’ screening — and history (both the exploding-offer episode and the still-unreformed federal clerkship market) shows incumbents can block reform. But three things cut the other way. First, unlike federal judges, law reviews are run by the very people the current system burns: student editors, who would be the reform’s biggest beneficiaries. Second, top journals still do fine under a match — they get strong articles without the frenzy. Third, medicine showed how to de-risk adoption: before the residency match went live in the 1950s, administrators ran a trial — collecting rankings and running the algorithm in parallel while the old system operated — and the results made the case for switching. Law reviews could do exactly the same, at no cost to anyone.

The Takeaway

The literature on law review reform has spent decades arguing about who should select articles — students, faculty, peer reviewers. Those debates are worth having, and reasonable people (including the two of us) can land in different places on the ideal end state. But whoever you put in the selection seat, facing thousands of manuscripts on deadlines set by rivals’ expedite clocks, they will end up skimming and leaning on letterhead. So our claim is more modest, and we think more actionable: without settling any of the big debates, and while keeping essentially everything that makes law reviews what they are — student editing, multiple submission, fast timelines — we could make the system dramatically better for everyone in it, just by changing how offers and acceptances happen. Matching theory gives a proven, implementable way to do exactly that. And once the plumbing exists, the more ambitious reforms — peer review chief among them — have somewhere to live.

The full paper — including the history of how law reviews ended up this way, the formal mechanism design, and the open questions we can’t yet resolve — is here. Comments very welcome; unlike the current submission process, we promise to read them.