I write this introduction after more than a year serving as editor of Law & Society Review. The past year has been an interesting and exciting one for me. I have been impressed by the range of articles that have been submitted to the Review and by the overall quality of the submissions that I have received. This has also been a challenge because it has meant that I have not been able to publish every manuscript that in other circumstances might have been deemed publishable. It has also meant that the Association has twice now gone to our publisher, Blackwell, and asked that the number of pages in the Review be increased, from 800 for volume 37 to 896 in volume 38, and to 1,008 for the current volume 39 (numbers divisible by 16 to reflect the physical printing process used for the Review).
Even with the increase in the number of pages we are publishing, the flow of high-quality manuscripts has maintained pressure on the decision process. In significant part because of my commitment to make the pages of the Review available to as wide a group of scholars as possible, I have decided not to commission or seek out symposium issues such as that on constitutional ethnography published last year. Committing pages to a symposium issue would take away from the space available for articles coming in through the normal submission process, which at present is producing a more than adequate flow of manuscripts. This does not mean that I will not entertain ideas for special issues, but the idea must be compelling and the circumstances right to proceed with a call for submissions (something that the Review has traditionally required for any special issue or special symposium).
While I will not be seeking out special issues or symposiums, I hope to be able to create several “mini-symposiums” from the normal flow of articles. In this issue there is such a symposium, bringing together three articles focusing on law and legal processes in the workplace. The articles by Professors Albiston, Marshall, and Hoffmann all came in as independent submissions and went through the standard reviewing cycle. To put these articles together as a group did require that I move one forward in terms of its publication date; I will continue to make decisions about publication dates in a way that facilitates creating sets of related articles such as these.
As noted in my Editor's Introduction at the beginning of Volume 38, we have moved to an all-electronic system for submitting and reviewing manuscripts. This has produced a significant savings in time for the reviewing process, and an even greater savings in time from the author's perspective. Most manuscripts are in the hands of (or at least the e-mail inbox of) reviewers within forty-eight hours of the manuscript's submission; by “submission” I mean the equivalent in the traditional paper system of the moment an author put the manuscript into a mailbox. The median time from when an author submits a manuscript until the author receives a decision is six weeks. (Under the old system, we could only track the time from when the editorial office received a manuscript until the decision letter was mailed to the author from the office, which was about a week less than the time it took from the author's perspective.) One personal plus of this system is that it has made it possible for me to perform my duties as editor while being on sabbatical from the University of Wisconsin and away from Madison for the 2004–05 academic year.
We have made one minor change in format for Volume 39. We have eliminated the separate section in each issue entitled “About the Authors”; the author information is now included at the end of each article. This change came in response to a suggestion by a reader who was accessing an article through an electronic service. The reader found it awkward to have to look at a separate section for information about the author and suggested that, given the increasing reliance on electronic formats, it would be easier for readers if the biographical information about the author was in the same file as the article itself.
Finally, readers may be interested in what they will be seeing in the next several issues of the Review. The following articles have been accepted for publication later this year:
Stuart Banner, “Preparing to Be Colonized: Land Tenure and Legal Strategy in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii”
Jeffrey Dudas, “In the Name of Equal Rights: ‘Special’ Rights and the Politics of Resentment in Post–Civil Rights America”
David Garland, “Penal Excess and Surplus Meaning: Public Torture Lynchings in Twentieth-Century America”
Mark Golub, “Plessy as ‘Passing’: Judicial Responses to Ambiguously Raced Bodies in Plessy v. Ferguson”
Ryken Grattet and Valerie Jenness, “The Reconstitution of Law in Local Settings: Agency Discretion, Ambiguity, and a Surplus of Law in the Policing of Hate Crime”
Xin He, “Why Do They Not Obey the Law? A Case Study of Rural-Urban Migrants in Beijing”
Timothy R. Johnson, James F. Spriggs II, and Paul J. Wahlbeck, “Passing and Strategic Voting on the U.S. Supreme Court”
Stefanie Lindquist and David Klein, “The Influence of Jurisprudential Considerations on Supreme Court Decision-making: A Study of Conflict Cases”
Rekha Mirchandani, “What's So Special About Specialized Courts? The State and Social Change in Salt Lake City's Domestic Violence Court”
Ken-ichi Ohbuchi, Ikuo Sugawara, Kazuhiko Teshigahara, and Ken-ichiro Imazai, “Litigants' Appraisals of Procedural Fairness and Responses to Civil Trial and the Trial System in Japan”
Justin B. Richland, ‘“What Are You Going to Do With the Village's Knowledge?’ Talking Tradition, Talking Law in Hopi Tribal Court”
Mary R. Rose, “A Dutiful Voice: Justice in the Distribution of Jury Service”
Kevin Scott, “Understanding Judicial Hierarchy: Reversals and the Behavior of Intermediate Appellate Judges”
Nan Seuffert, “Nation as Partnership: Gender Alliances Across Race”
Erich Steinman, “Legitimizing American Indian Sovereignty: Mobilizing the Constitutive Power of Law through Institutional Entrepreneurship”
David Thacher, “Local Role in Homeland Security”
Mariana Valverde, “Authorizing the Production of Urban Moral Order: Appellate Courts and Their Knowledge Games”
Catherine E. Warrick, “The Vanishing Victim: Gender and Criminal Law in Jordan”
John Wooldredge, Timothy Griffin, and Fritz Rauschenberg, “Sentencing Reform and Reductions in the Disparate Treatment of Felony Defendants”
In addition, there will be a review symposium on Lloyd Burton's Worship and Wilderness and a review essay by Joe Rollins focusing on several recent books on same-sex marriage.
