Excess of Democracy

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The twenty-two law reviews you should follow on Twitter

While you could follow a pretty sizeable list of law reviews I've maintained on Twitter, there are a handful of law reviews that rise above the rest.

Last year, I listed the sixteen law reviews to follow on Twitter. I've modified the criteria slightly and updated it. I've mentioned that I find Twitter one of the best places to stumble upon scholarship and engage in a first layer of discussion about new ideas.

In my view, it's actually shocking how challenging it is to find recently journal content. Many journals don't maintain a Twitter feed, much less a decent web site--most lack an RSS, are updated infrequently at best, and often include stock art (because, apparently, law reviews are into stock art?). Given scarce resources that law schools have today, one might expect schools to find ways of maximizing the value from their investments in their journals.

(Also, some advice you're welcome to ignore if you're developing a Twitter handle. Avoid symbols like underscores in your name. Eschew the "U" for your university if possible. Abbreviate LRev and LJ if you can. You want as concise a title to ensure maximum ability for people to communicate a message in 140 characters when mentioning your username. And you want it to be clear who you are: too brief a nickname for your law school may not communicate much about your brand to the casual Twitter follower.)

Alas, I'll settle for the occasional tweet on the subject. I looked at the flagship law reviews at the 105 law schools with a U.S. News & World Report peer score of 2.2 or higher.  If I found their Twitter accounts, I included them. I then examined how many tweets they had, how many followers they had, and when their last tweet (not a retweet) took place. I then created a benchmark, a slightly stricter standard than last year (as another year has passed!): the law reviews "worth following" are those with at least 150 tweets, at least 150 followers, and at least one tweet (not a retweet or direct reply) in the last 30 days. I thought that would be a pretty minimal standard for level of engagement and recency of engagement. This 150/150/30 standard reduces the list to 22 accounts worth following:

Harvard Law Review

Stanford Law Review

Yale Law Journal

Columbia Law Review

Chicago Law Review

NYU Law Review

California Law Review

Michigan Law Review

Penn Law Review

Texas Law Review

UCLA Law Review

George Washington Law Review

Boston University Law Review

Iowa Law Review

Ohio State Law Journal

Florida Law Review

Illinois Law Review

Washington Law Review

Connecticut Law Review

Case Western Reserve Law Review

St. Louis University Law Journal

Syracuse Law Review

It's fairly notable, I think, that half of the schools on this list have a top-20 peer reputation score and that every single one of the top 9 schools in peer reputation make the list. Indeed, follower count is highly correlated with peer score (0.57)!

Below is the complete list of these journals, with 150/150/30 law reviews highlighted. If you see a journal not listed, tweet me about it @derektmuller.

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