Deconstructing the Rejection Letter: A Look at Elitism in Article Selection
![handle is hein.journals/jled49 and id is 611 raw text is: Deconstructing the Rejection Letter:
A Look at Elitism in Article Selection
Dan Subotnik and Glen Lazar
[1] here are many... ameritocratic considerations that frequently enter into
evaluations of a scholar's work. The proper response... is not to scrap the
meritocratic ideal [but] to abjure all practices that exploit [its] trappings...
-friendship, the reputation of one's school-.. . that have nothing to do
with the intellectual characteristics of the subject being judged.
- Randall L Kennedy'
Deep down in the jungle so they say
There's a signifying [monkey] down the way
There hadn't been no disturbin' in thejungle for quite a bit,
For upjumped the monkey in the tree one day and laughed,
I guess I'll start some shit.
- Old African-American toast2
Teachers teach nonsense, says Duncan Kennedy, when they seek to
persuade students that legal reasoning is distinct, as a method for reaching
correct results, from ethical or political discourse in general.3 Of course, the
nonsense has some sense to it. It provides the legal process with the patina of
neutrality which allows the law to become a major vehicle for the mainte-
nance of existing social and power relations[, which are] characterized by
domination.4
Does nonsense, one wonders, flow the other way as well? Consider the
student law review editor who rejects an article ostensibly because of deficien-
cies in the author's legal reasoning. Might the real reason be political? Imagine
that the editor represents a highly influential law review and the author is an
Dan Subotnik is a professor at the Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center, Touro College. Glen Lazar, an
attorney, is research adviser to the Touvo Inkmational Law Review.
The authors acknowledge the help of Ken RosenblumJane Reinhardt, Rena Seplowitz, Gerard
Glannattasio, Peter Davis, Amy Stein, Melissa Koehn, Deborah J. Merritt, Bruce Morton, Jill
Selden, Howard Glickstein, Lillian Spiess, and, above all, Rose R. Subomik.
1. Racial Critiques of Legal Academia, 102 Harv. L Rev. 1745, 1807 (1989).
2. Roger D. Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of
Philadelphia, 1st rev. ed., 113 (Chicago, 1970).
3. SeeAndrewAltman, Critical Legal Studies: ALiberal Critique 14 (Princeton, 1990) (quoting
Kennedy, Legal Education as Training for Hierarchy, in The Politics of Law, ed. David Kairys,
47 (NewYork, 1982)).
4. Id. at 15 (quoting David Kairys, Introduction, in Politics of Law, supra note 3, at 5-6).
Journal of Legal Education, Volume 49, Number 4 (December 1999)](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/jled49&div=55&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Deconstructing the Rejection Letter: A Look at Elitism in Article Selection
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