It is law review submission season, so I have had many conversations lately both on and off of social media about the student-run law review system. This recent poll by Professor Derek Muller was interesting, for example.
The quality of law review articles in top law journals is ___ it was ten years ago.
— Derek T. Muller (@derektmuller) February 22, 2024
I think it is a given that everybody thinks scholarly journals should publish better scholarship, and not publish worse scholarship. But as I thought about Professor Muller's question it seems to me that it's important to distinguish between the two different kinds of mistakes a journal can make: false positives (i.e., publishing something bad) and false negatives (i.e. declining to publish something good).