Legal Journals

Canada’s prestigious law journals have been around for decades and have published through wars, depressions and other upheavals. But they’ve never seen anything like the internet before.

Now, with their traditional printing-and-mailing model under heavy stress, law journals face flourishing competition from online content that can be vetted, edited, peer-reviewed and posted much faster than print. Online writers, editors and bloggers are not constrained by word count or publishing costs, and its audience can read an article the moment it’s ready, it can go live.

Seven American universities, including Cornell, Duke and Stanford, are now collaborating to produce a free online magazine with high-quality legal scholarship. How will Canada’s law journals respond?

Seo Yun Yang is the editor-in-chief of the McGill Law Journal. “We have an open access policy,” says Yang. “PDF versions of the articles go up soon after the Journal is published.” But with online content so much faster and cheaper, is the time, effort and cost of publishing a print edition still worth it? “Law journals are rooted in the culture of academia, so whatever content could be posted faster would not be seen as legal scholarship,” says Yang.

Beth Bilson is a professor of law at the University of Saskatchewan and the editor of the Canadian Bar Review (CBR). The CBR, which dates back to 1923, is now published entirely online, with print copies available for subscribers upon request. Although Canadian Bar Association members receive the Bar Review as a membership benefit, the general public has to pay if they want to access current and past CBR articles.

“One pressure familiar to all publishers of online material is the pressure to remove all barriers to access,” says Bilson. “But then the problem is, how do you finance the publication? Putting everything online was an expensive undertaking, and that is part of the reason why the CBA has resisted opening access further. We have had discussions [about access], but so far, that case has failed to catch and the CBR’s status as member-protected content remains.”

Yang agrees with the need for access, but sees no great advantages to going fully digital. “Even if we went to a pure online form, we would still be collecting articles and e-publishing them as issues, not one at a time,” she says. “Legal scholarship will never be able to print an article every day. It will never happen. There would be no way for us to manage and edit the content needed to put something up that frequently.

“Print will be only out of date when practitioners, students, and their leaders abandon the print form,” Yang adds. “But for a lot of people, old habits die hard. Our readership spans a wide range of ages and backgrounds, so if they are used to the print form, they will not automatically switch to reading blogs online.”

But Bilson can see change in the offing. “I think we will see further developments like the Osgoode Hall blog [“The Court” (www.thecourt.ca)], where you get rapid commentary from senior academics on emerging issues. There are people who are immersed in the issues and who can respond intelligently in a fairly short turnaround time. But those same people also take the time to produce reflective pieces that will be published in traditional journals nine months from now. There will continue to be room for both.”

By Ava Chisling, a longtime writer and editor and a media lawyer in private practice in Montreal: http://www.linkedin.com/in/chisling. This article appears in National Magazine's 2009 Law Student Issue.