A number of law journals, especially fairly highly-ranked ones, categorically refuse to consider articles submitted by students. (They may consider notes by students at the host school, but almost never extraterritorially.) Of course, some journals break these rules, but at a number that I'm familiar with the exclusion seems fairly categorical.

A friend of Crescat asked me why this made any sense; you'd think that a journal committed to publishing excellent pieces would be happy to have them wherever they came from. Indeed, the discrimination against student authors at the top levels creates something of an advantage for lower-ranked journals who can gobble up great student work that higher journals won't take merely because of its author.

So why do journals do this? I came up with four hypotheses:

1, Laziness: Journals gets lots of articles and lots of articles editors look for excuses not to have to read tem all. Most forms of identity-based quality-screening are unseemly, so journals do them in secret, but for whatever reason, anti-student screening can be done openly. This seems to beg the question.

2, Mentorship: Journals serve two missions, both to publish good pieces, but also to help their own students and members develop as writers. Pieces by students at other schools crowd out to some extent pieces by students at that school. Of course, it's not clear that an article by a 3L at Chicago "crowds out" mentorship any more than one by an assistant professor at the Salmon P. Chase College of Law.

3, Jealousy and tribalism: Students at lower-ranked schools see themselves as having few publication opportunities, and thus in unfair competition with those at Harvard, Yale, or elsewhere. They figure that if those students were permitted to submit everywhere then there would be 400 pieces by T5 students every year and none by any others.

4, Corruption. A piece gets published because of a combination of 1, its academic merit, and 2, the degree of unethical or other influence that its author and the authors can bring to bear. Most journals are eager to resist 2 as much as they can, which is why they grade blindly, force articles editors to recuse themselves when their recommenders submit pieces, and so on. Students might possess influence and connections much more disproportionately to their scholarly quality, since a law professor at a mid-ranked school is probably a much better scholar than your average student at Yale, even if he has fewer Yale profs pulling for his piece. Of course, this rationale would also probably justify excluding practioners.