Meet the Editors

Jan 5, 2010 Michael Froomkin

Section Editors

The Section Editors choose the Contributing Editors and exercise editorial control over their section. In addition, each Section Editor will write at least one contribution (“jot”) per year. Questions about contributing to a section ought usually to be addressed to the section editors.

Professor Bridget J. Crawford
Pace Law School

Professor William LaPiana
Rita and Joseph Solomon Professor of Wills, Trusts, and Estates; Director, Estate Planning, Graduate Tax Program, New York Law School

Contributing Editors

Contributing Editors agree to write at least one jot for Jotwell each year.

Professor Julia Belian
Detroit Mercy School of Law

Professor Gerry W. Beyer
Governor Preston E. Smith Regents Professor of Law, 2005, Texas Tech University School of Law

Professor Alfred Brophy
Reef C. Ivey II Professor of Law, University of North Carolina School of Law

Professor Jeffrey A. Cooper
Quinnipiac University School of Law

Professor Alyssa DiRusso
Cumberland School of Law

Professor Thomas Gallanis
N. William Hines Professor of Law Professor of History, University of Iowa College of Law

Professor Mitchell Gans
Hofstra University School of Law

Professor Wendy Gerzog
University of Baltimore School of Law

Professor Iris Goodwin
University of Tennessee School of Law

Professor Joanna Grossman
Professor of Law and John DeWitt Gregory Research Scholar, Hofstra University School of Law

Professor Melanie Leslie
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law

Professor Browne C. Lewis
Cleveland-Marshall College of Law

Professor María Pabón López
Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis

Professor Ray D. Madoff
Boston College Law School

Professor Solangel Maldonado
Seton Hall University School of Law

Professor Paula Monopoli
Professor of Law, Marbury Research Professor and Founding Director, Women Leadership & Equality Program, University of Maryland School of Law

Professor Laura Rosenbury
Washington University School of Law

Professor Randall Roth
The William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

Professor Robert Sitkoff
John L. Gray Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Professor Stewart Sterk
H. Bert and Ruth Mack Professor of Real Estate Law, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law

Professor Joshua C. Tate
SMU Dedman School of Law

Professor Lee-ford Tritt
Director, Center for Estate and Elder Law Planning; Director, Estates & Trusts Practice Certificate Program;  Associate Director, Center on Children and Families, University of Florida Levin College of Law

Professor Michael Yu
California Western School of Law

Call for Papers

Jan 5, 2010 Michael Froomkin

Jotwell: The Journal of Things We Like (Lots) seeks short reviews of (very) recent scholarship related to the law that the reviewer likes and thinks deserves a wide audience. The ideal Jotwell review will not merely celebrate scholarly achievement, but situate it in the context of other scholarship in a manner that explains to both specialists and non-specialists why the work is important.

Although critique is welcome, reviewers should choose the subjects they write about with an eye toward identifying and celebrating work that makes an original contribution, and that will be of interest to others. Please see the Jotwell Mission Statement for more details.

Reviews need not be written in a particularly formal manner. Contributors should feel free to write in a manner that will be understandable to scholars, practitioners, and even non-lawyers.

Ordinarily, a Jotwell contribution will

• be between 500-1000 words;
• focus on one work, ideally a recent article, but a discussion of a recent book is also welcome;
• begin with a hyperlink to the original work — in order to make the conversation as inclusive as possible, there is a strong preference for reviews to focus on scholarly works that can be found online without using a subscription service such as Westlaw or Lexis. That said, reviews of articles that are not freely available online, and also of very recent books, are also welcome.

Initially, Jotwell particularly seeks contributions relating to:

• Administrative Law
• Constitutional Law
• Corporate Law
• Criminal Law
• Cyberlaw
• Intellectual Property Law
• Jurisprudence
• Legal Profession
• Tax Law
• Trusts & Estates
• Worklaw

We intend to add more sections in the coming months.

References

Authors are responsible for the content and cite-checking of their own articles. Jotwell editors and staff may make editorial suggestions, and may alter the formatting to conform to the house style, but the author remains the final authority on content appearing under his or her name.

• Please keep citations to a minimum.
• Please include a hyperlink, if possible, to any works referenced.
• Textual citations are preferred. Endnotes, with hyperlinks, are allowed if your HTML skills extend that far.
• Authors are welcome to follow The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (18th ed. 2005), or the The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style (2d Ed.) or indeed to adopt any other citation form which makes it easy to find the work cited.

Technical

Jotwell publishes in HTML, which is a very simple text format and which does not lend itself to footnotes; textual citations are much preferred.

Contributors should email their article, in plain text, in HTML, or in a common wordprocessor format (Open Office, WordPerfect, or Word) to ed.jotwell@gmail.com and we will forward the article to the appropriate Section Editors. Or you may, if you prefer, contact the appropriate Section Editors directly.

Jotwell Mission Statement

Jan 5, 2010 Michael Froomkin

The Journal of Things We Like (Lots)–JOTWELL–invites you to join us in filling a telling gap in legal scholarship by creating a space where legal academics will go to identify, celebrate, and discuss the best new legal scholarship. Currently there are about 350 law reviews in North America, not to mention relevant journals in related disciplines, foreign publications, and new online pre-print services such as SSRN and BePress. Never in legal publishing have so many written so much, and never has it been harder to figure out what to read, both inside and especially outside one’s own specialization. Perhaps if legal academics were more given to writing (and valuing) review essays, this problem would be less serious. But that is not, in the main, our style.

We in the legal academy value originality. We celebrate the new. And, whether we admit it or not, we also value incisiveness. An essay deconstructing, distinguishing, or even dismembering another’s theory is much more likely to be published, not to mention valued, than one which focuses mainly on praising the work of others. Books may be reviewed, but articles are responded to; and any writer of a response understands that his job is to do more than simply agree.

Most of us are able to keep abreast of our fields, but it is increasingly hard to know what we should be reading in related areas. It is nearly impossible to situate oneself in other fields that may be of interest but cannot be the major focus of our attention.

A small number of major law journals once served as the gatekeepers of legitimacy and, in so doing, signaled what was important. To be published in Harvard or Yale or other comparable journals was to enjoy an imprimatur that commanded attention; to read, or at least scan, those journals was due diligence that one was keeping up with developments in legal thinking and theory. The elite journals still have importance – something in Harvard is likely to get it and its author noticed. However, a focus on those few most-cited journals alone was never enough, and it certainly is not adequate today. Great articles appear in relatively obscure places. (And odd things sometimes find their way into major journals.) Plus, legal publishing has been both fragmented and democratized: specialty journals, faculty peer reviewed journals, interdisciplinary journals, all now play important roles in the intellectual ecology.

The Michigan Law Review publishes a useful annual review of new law books, but there’s nothing comparable for legal articles, some of which are almost as long as books (or are future books). Today, new intermediaries, notably subject-oriented legal blogs, provide useful if sometimes erratic notices and observations regarding the very latest scholarship. But there’s still a gap: other than asking the right person, there’s no easy and obvious way to find out what’s new, important, and interesting in most areas of the law.

Jotwell will help fill that gap. We will not be afraid to be laudatory, nor will we give points for scoring them. Rather, we will challenge ourselves and our colleagues to share their wisdom and be generous with their praise. We will be positive without apology.

Tell us what we ought to read!

How It Works

Jotwell will be organized in sections, each reflecting a subject area of legal specialization. Each section, with its own url of the form sectionname.jotwell.com, will be managed by a pair of Section Editors who will have independent editorial control over that section. The Section Editors will also be responsible for selecting a team of ten or more Contributing Editors. Each of these editors will commit to writing at least one Jotwell essay of 500-1000 words per year in which they identify and explain the significance of one or more significant recent works – preferably an article accessible online, but we won’t be doctrinaire about it. Our aim is to have at least one contribution appear in each section on a fixed day every month, although we won’t object to more. Section Editors will also be responsible for approving unsolicited essays for publication. Our initial sections will cover administrative law, constitutional law, corporate law, criminal law, cyberlaw, intellectual property law, legal profession, and tax law — and we intend to add new sections when there is interest in doing so.

For the legal omnivore, the ‘front page’ at Jotwell.com will contain the first part of every essay appearing elsewhere on the site. Links will take you to the full version in the individual sections. There, articles will be open to comments from readers.

The Details

Learn more about Jotwell:

• Style guide
• Acceptable use policy
• Copyright Policy
• Privacy policy