The Path of the Law Review: How Inter-field Ties Contribute to Institutional Emergence and Buffer against Change

Abstract

Early neoinstitutional scholarship tended to assume institutional reproduction, while more recent accounts privilege situations in which alternative models from outside an organizational environment or delegitimizing criticism from within precipitate institutional change. We know little about institutions that persist despite such change conditions. Recent advances in sociological field theory suggest that inter-field ties contribute to institutional change but ignore how such ties may reinforce institutions. Extending both approaches, I integrate self-reinforcing mechanisms from path-dependence scholarship into field theory. I elucidate my framework with an analysis of the student-edited, student-reviewed law review. Despite sustained criticisms from those who publish in them and despite its anomalous position relative to the dominant peer-reviewed journal practices of other disciplines, the student-edited law review remains a bedrock institution of law schools and legal scholarship. My analysis covers the law review’s entire institutional history, from prior to the first law review’s emergence in 1875 to its current state. I combine qualitative historical analyses of law reviews and legal scholarship with quantitative analyses of law-review structures and field contestation. I argue that self-reinforcing mechanisms evident in law review’s ties to related fields – legal practice, law schools, the university, and legal journals – have buffered it against change.