From Filling Volumes to Raising Standards: Reflections on a Discipline Coming into Its Own

Introduction

As we celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Legal Writing Institute and the publication of volume 30 of Legal Writing: The Journal of the Legal Writing Institute, it is a fitting time to reflect on the journey of both the Journal and our discipline. I had the distinct honor of serving as Editor in Chief for Volumes 15 through 18, after several years as an Assistant Editor, Editorial Board member, and Assistant Editor in Chief. My tenure coincided with a period of profound growth and transformation for the Journal, a time when our community consciously worked to solidify legal writing’s identity as a mature scholarly discipline. My essay reflects on that pivotal era, marked by strategic planning to define our mission, collaboration to strengthen our collective voice, and a culminating symposium that celebrated our coming of age. It is a story of how the Journal not only mirrored but actively shaped the professionalization of our field.

I. The Growth of the Journal and the Legal Writing Discipline (1991–2010)

The Journal’s founding stemmed from Professor Chris Rideout’s vision to create a home for our nascent discipline. The early years were characterized by grassroots energy and a coming together of colleagues passionate about teaching and writing, eager to build a community where none had existed. By the time I joined the Journal’s Editorial Board, that foundational community had blossomed, but it was also facing the growing pains of adolescence.

When I stepped into the Editor in Chief role, the Journal was navigating a critical transition. A 2007 Editorial Board retreat laid bare our challenges: we were struggling to manage our workload, catch up on delayed volumes that had damaged our reputation, and navigate a difficult relationship with a new publisher. Our past retreats had focused on how to fill volumes; now, we were focused on managing the influx of submissions and restoring confidence among authors. The goal was clear: to become more selective and establish the Journal as the premier, reliable venue for scholarship in our field.

This internal push for greater rigor reflected the broader development across the discipline. Legal writing programs nationwide were gradually professionalizing, shifting from dependence on student instructors to more comprehensive, faculty-led curricula.^[1] The “lockstep fashion” of early programs was giving way to diverse curricula and an increase in upper-level writing courses.^[2]

Just as our programs matured, so did our scholarship. The Journal’s journey during this period involved transforming from a publication that fostered a new field into one that curated the scholarship of a well-established, sophisticated academic discipline.

II. Strategic Planning and Mission Development

Our challenges required a period of careful strategic planning. A key moment occurred during our Editorial Board retreat in December 2007 when we addressed the operational and reputational issues that were hindering our progress. Our discussions marked a fundamental shift in our mindset. While previous retreats had focused on simply gathering enough content to fill a volume, we were now concentrating on how to manage a heavy workload and, more importantly, how to improve the quality and reputation of the Journal. Our clear goal was to become more selective and to position the Journal as the leading publication for authors in our field.

This new mission required us to be both pragmatic and visionary. We addressed production delays with our publisher and aimed to improve the professionalism of our final product. We also embraced the digital age by establishing a strong online presence to publish articles before the print volume and to host additional materials that could enhance our scholarship.

As my Editor’s Notes from that time show, our mission was to offer “broad coverage of interesting and important issues related to legal writing, research, analysis, and pedagogy”^[3] and to challenge our readers to reevaluate their assumptions about legal education. At the same time, this evolving mission was not without internal tensions. We consistently balanced our traditional role in mentoring new scholars with the need to raise publication standards as our discipline matured.

III. Strategic Planning and Mission Development

A key part of our strategy was recognizing that the health of our field depended on more than just the success of our own journal. The legal writing community was also supported by another excellent peer-reviewed publication, the Journal of the Association of Legal Writing Directors (JALWD).^[4] Rather than viewing each other as competitors in a zero-sum competition for submissions, we recognized that our collective progress depended on collaboration and a shared purpose. We worked together to ensure our two journals had complementary missions, preventing a rivalry that could have divided our still-growing scholarly community.

This collaborative spirit was evident in the challenges we shared. Discussions about authors who preferred the faster, less rigorous process of student-edited law reviews showed a common struggle. Similar issues involved authors who would withdraw a piece after receiving an offer from a student-run journal that required no revisions. But perhaps the most significant challenge was the common perception of value within legal academia, where some authors reported their schools “valued the student-edited law review more than the peer-edited journal in the field.”^[5] In one case, a school would not give an author a scholarship stipend if they published in a peer-edited journal, forcing them to publish in a student-edited one to qualify.^[6]

With these shared experiences, we understood that the two journals needed to collaborate. We had to persuade our community, as well as deans and tenure committees, of the importance of the peer-review process and the prestige of publishing in our discipline’s leading journals. We required a united front to raise the entire field, and we recognized that this could be achieved only by strengthening all of its scholarly institutions together.

IV. The Mercer Symposium and Its Impact

The pinnacle of this period of growth and strategic focus was the symposium held at Mercer University in November 2009, “The Legal Writing Institute: Celebrating 25 Years of Teaching & Scholarship.” This event, which my Editorial Board co-organized with the Mercer Law Review, was more than just a conference; it was a statement of our discipline’s emergence. We brought together the pioneers and new leaders of our field to reflect on our history and plan for the future. The panels covered the full range of our work, from the history of the LWI and the evolution of our teaching, to the substance of our scholarship and the design of our programs.

The symposium showcased our collective intellectual strength. Professor Rideout, whose vision played a key role in founding the LWI and the Journal, delivered a luncheon address that was a moving highlight linking our history to our future. The intellectual energy was intense, leading to a series of articles published in Volume 16 of our Journal and a special Mercer Law Review volume, creating a lasting scholarly record of our progress.^[7]

Perhaps the most lasting legacy of the symposium was the creation of the Mary S. Lawrence Award for Excellence in Legal Scholarship.^[8] Mary, who had directed the University of Oregon’s program for twenty-two years and served as a senior editor for the Journal, embodied the quiet grace, teaching excellence, and scholarly insight to which we all aspired. Giving the inaugural award to Professor Rideout was a fitting tribute that symbolized the growth of our discipline—we had become a field that not only produced meaningful scholarship but also formally celebrated it.

V. Legal Writing as a Scholarly Discipline

The Mercer Symposium marked the transformation of legal writing from a practice-oriented teaching area into a strong scholarly discipline. This was not an overnight change but the result of years of deliberate effort. As Professor Rideout explained in his luncheon address, in our work we were developing a discipline with its own distinct practices, values, and ideologies.^[9] He described our core values as being “professionally progressive, pedagogically innovative, at times interpretive and hermeneutic, and at times political and reformist.”^[10] This framework reflected the intellectual depth that now defined our field.

The scholarship itself had evolved significantly. The symposium’s panel on scholarship, featuring prominent scholars like Linda Berger, Linda Edwards, and Terrill Pollman, focused on complex topics such as rhetoric, voice, and audience, a far cry from the “how to” pieces that marked the discipline’s early days.^[11] This scholarly maturation created new challenges, which were openly debated at the symposium. My own comments from the floor reflected the core tension we faced as journal editors: balancing our traditional role of mentoring new scholars with the imperative to raise the bar for publication to reflect the discipline’s increased rigor.^[12]

As our discipline matured, so did our responsibilities to one another. The transition to a more rigorous scholarly standard created a natural tension with the nurturing, “safe community” ethos that had defined the LWI’s early years. How could we, as journal editors, balance our mentoring roles with the need to raise the scholarly bar, especially when we had to decline the vast majority of submissions?

The path forward was not to abandon mentorship, but to redefine it. Mentorship was already happening through LWI Writers’ Workshops, ALWD Scholars’ Forums, and the extensive feedback provided by journal editors themselves. The community also played a role in setting expectations. Professor Linda Edwards suggested a powerful norm: that scholars should not submit an article until it has been reviewed by at least ten colleagues, ensuring it is truly ready for publication.^[13] This approach shifted the initial mentoring responsibility to the broader community, allowing the journals to focus on curating the most developed scholarship. Our future success depends on continuing this work—advocating for the value of our peer-reviewed journals to tenure committees and collectively fostering a culture of rigorous, collaborative scholarship before a manuscript ever reaches an editor’s desk.

Raising the bar for our authors also allowed us to do more to advocate for our role within the larger legal academy. This advocacy remains a focus of legal writing scholarly leaders to this day. We have to persuade deans and tenure committees that publishing in a peer-reviewed journal within our field is a significant scholarly achievement, at least comparable to publishing in a student-edited law review, if not more so. At this point, our journey was, and remains, about more than just producing scholarship; it is about establishing the institutional respect and professional standards needed to support and uphold a true academic discipline.

Conclusion and Legacy

My time as Editor in Chief of the Journal coincided with a significant period of growth for the legal writing discipline. It was an era marked by a deliberate and strategic effort to develop the foundation of a serious academic field. We transformed the Journal from a publication struggling with logistics into a respected, selective, and dependable venue for legal writing scholarship. We prioritized collaboration over competition, working with our colleagues at JALWD to strengthen the discipline as a whole. This intense growth period culminated in the Mercer Symposium, an event that not only celebrated twenty-five years of progress but also reinforced our scholarly identity by establishing the Mary S. Lawrence Award.

Leading the Journal these years was a great privilege. It offered a front-row seat to—and, I hope, a meaningful part in—the story of our discipline’s evolution. Our work went beyond just publishing articles; it was about defining a mission, setting standards, and establishing the institutional credibility that will support future scholars. As we celebrate the Journal’s thirty-fifth anniversary and the publication of Volume 30, we can be proud of the discipline we’ve built—one that is progressive, innovative, and intellectually lively. The journey is far from over, but the foundation is strong, and the future of legal writing scholarship looks brighter than ever.