The twenty-two (or twenty-three) law reviews you should follow on Twitter (2016)
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 twenty-two 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 continues to surprise me 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. (More on this soon.)
Alas, I'll settle for the occasional tweet on the subject. I looked at the flagship law reviews at the 106 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, modified slightly from last year: the law reviews "worth following" are those with at least 200 tweets, at least 200 followers, and at least one tweet (not a retweet or direct reply) in the last 45 days (as of July 1, 2016). I thought that would be a pretty minimal standard for level of engagement and recency of engagement. This 200/200/45 standard reduces the list to 23 accounts worth following (UPDATE: the original list was just 22, but I found one more thanks to Elli Olson):
University of Chicago Law Review
Northwestern University Law Review
University of Illinois Law Review
Case Western Reserve Law Review
Georgia State University Law Review
St. Louis University Law Journal
It's fairly notable, I think, that a majority of the schools on this list have a top-30 peer reputation score. Indeed, follower count is highly correlated with peer score (0.59)! There is also a high degree of continuity between last year's list and this year's list, showing, I think, that continuity matters for many of these journals' social media presence--and, perhaps, that it's harder for many journals to get anything started with a lasting institutional memory.
Below is the complete list of these journals, with 200/200/45 law reviews highlighted. If you see a journal not listed, tweet me about it @derektmuller.