Prof. Paul Robinson (Penn), a top criminal law scholar, is leading this project, and I think it's an excellent idea. I think we should have more faculty-supervised law journals, though I think there's also merit in student-edited law journals—having a mix of editorial structures may be better than having all be one or all be the other. (Indeed, the structure of this journal looks like it would be different from that of some other faculty-run journals, such as our Journal of Free Speech Law, but there too I think it's good to have different journals experimenting with different models.)
In any event, the Independent Law Journal is still in its planning stages, but if you're a law professor, legal scholar, or judge who supports the ILJ's mission, please get in touch with the ILJ folks. Here's the Journal's announcement, from Prof. Robinson:
Help Us Improve Publishing in Legal Academia
Legal academia is unique among academic fields in that publishing is largely controlled by graduate students through the law review system. While this saves faculty time, it also leads to numerous downsides when third-year law students guide scholarship in topics they barely know. Students on law review tend to be both less knowledgeable and more ideologically extreme than their professors. The result is a system that struggles to recognize good scholarship and penalizes pieces that differ from the current academic mainstream. Nobody benefits when free debate is suppressed, publications are siloed by ideology, and editors making publishing decisions simply don't know enough to determine an article's contribution to the literature.
To help foster high-quality publishing and free and robust debate in legal academia, a number of law professors from top schools are working together to start a new publication—the Independent Law Journal. All articles published in the Journal will be peer-approved by a faculty board, but student staff will still handle most of the Journal's operations and will collaborate with faculty in initial article selection. The Journal's mission statement is as follows:
