We are finally completing a long overdue upgrade to the latest version of Movable Type. If things seem weird around here, that's why.

In Lior Strahilevitz's fascinating article on the right to destroy, one point he touches upon is the destruction of one's personal papers or rough drafts. From a viewpoint of social welfare rather than personal autonomy, there is an obvious tension here-- forbid people from destroying their political or artistic papers and the public gets more information, whether it is the Watergate tapes or The Trial. On the other hand, this may make artists and politicians less likely to even keep the information in the first place.

On that note, Helen Vendler's piece in The New Republic criticizes the decision to publish Elizabeth Bishop's repudiated poems. Vendler does not think this stuff should have been lost to us, but she does think that it is misleading and demeaning to Bishop to publish these poems with Bishop's name on them, given that Bishop was unwilling to put her name to them herself.

I am generally sympathetic to Vendler's point; artists should be permitted to be exacting, and those who clean up after them should be clear that they are exposing scrap heaps rather than treasure troves. That said, I'm pleased that the new collection of Bishop's work apparently includes all of the working drafts of her masterful One Art. When I was at Cambridge, I heard a great talk by Professor Michael Wood about those drafts and had been planning a trip to Poughkeepsie to go dig through them myself. Now I can simply make a trip to Labyrinth.

A recent trend in both federalism and Supreme Court advocacy (two interests of mine) has been the proliferation of Solicitors General at the state level. David Zaring notes that the District of Columbia has joined the trend, meaning, I suppose, that I should have written "at the state and federal-enclave level". I wonder, for those of us who believe in the constitutionalization of the unitary executive, whether the Solicitor General of the District of Columbia is required to report to the White House.

I think I recently wrote a post about why I wasn't writing posts as much as I used to (with reference to this blog's decreased traffic in recent months) but it seems to have mercifully disappeared. At any rate, the post also served as home to a few links, including Jack Goldsmith's republication of Justice Jackson's draft opinion in Quirin and Ilya Somin's guest-stint at the Volokh Conspiracy (as well as a minor colloquy about federal abortion regulation at Originalisms).

Paul Caron and Orin Kerr discuss some recent survey evidence about how some number of law journals select pieces for publication.

While I am hesitant to reply to a statistic with an anecdote, I thought it might be helpful to note that at least at the Yale Law Journal, our practices differ substantially from what appears to be the norm. The articles committee's deliberations are quite secret, so I won't say anything on that score, but in two respects our practices appear substantially different than what Caron reports.

One respect is advice from faculty. While the ultimate decisions on publication ultimately rest with us, we do receive a great deal of advice and feedback from faculty members both at Yale and many other places before the publication of the vast majority of our faculty scholarship. I suppose this puts us in the "7%" category of Caron's survey.

The other respect is authorial identity. We have a blind submissions process, which we work rather hard to protect. The result is that we publish some scholarship by established names (who are established for good reason) and others by folks who are relatively unknown. I don't even know where all of the authors in Volume 116 went to law school. If there is a correlation between being published in the YLJ and going to certain schools, it is because of what one learns at those schools, not the resume line.

Finally, I'm intrigued by what appears to be the belief among faculty that a piece's chances are improved by being "expedited" (i.e., accepted by another law journal with a relatively short deadline) or even that those "expedites" are the only way to get review in the first place. We read every submission. If anything, being expedite may actually hurt a piece's chances. If it forces our decisions to be made more quickly, an expedited piece generally faces a slightly higher bar.

At any rate, these observations are entirely my own, and in no way represent the official policies of the Yale Law Journal, and most certainly should not be taken to trump any statements to the contrary made on the journal's website or by the journal's officers. But to those authors who think the articles submissions practice is a black box, I hope these thoughts shed a little bit of light.

UPDATE: Let me note in response to some skeptical emails, let me note that these observations don't necessarily apply in full to Yale faculty (although they mostly do) and that they certainly aren't intended to describe the practice in previous years.