Two Law Publishing Announcements

1. Irwin Law has announced the development of its own online e-books platform. As of July 31, 2009, their current licensing agreement with LexisNexis Quicklaw will come to an end, and digital versions of all Irwin Law texts will be exclusively available on their proprietary platform as of the next day. Jeffrey Miller, Irwin publisher, makes it clear in his announcement to current authors that:

We respect the work of our authors and recognize our responsibility to publish in a manner that enhances their return and their reputation, while at the same time protecting their intellectual property rights. Finally, our view is that electronic publishing should support our print program, but that e-books cannot replace the utility or the experience of the printed page. We believe that all these goals can best be accomplished within the framework of our own Irwin Law e-book platform.

2. Harvard University Press has announced the publication of the Journal of Legal Analysis, a peer-reviewed and faculty-edited journal that will publish “the best legal scholarship from all disciplinary perspectives and in all styles, whether verbal, formal, or empirical.” Of note is the fact that the JLA will be open access, and all articles will be published on the journal website as soon as they are available.

The table of contents of volume 1, number 1 is as follows:

• Many-Minds Arguments In Legal Theory, by Adrian Vermeule
• Are Judges Overpaid? A Skeptical Response To The Judicial Salary Debate, by Stephen J. Choi, G. Mitu Gulati, and Eric A. Posner
• Equality In Criminal Law: The Two Divergent Western Roads, by James Q. Whitman
• Judicial Review Of Class Action Settlements, by Jonathan R. Macey and Geoffrey P. Miller
• Impossibility, Impracticability, and Frustration, by Melvin A. Eisenberg
• Extremism And Social Learning, by Edward L. Glaeser and Cass R. Sunstein
• Bonham’s Case, Judicial Review, and The Law Of Nature, by R. H. Helmholz
• Estimating The Effect Of Damages Caps In Medical Malpractice Cases, by David A. Hyman, Bernard Black, Charles Silver, and William M. Sage (Coming Soon)

(What, I wonder, can they mean by “whether verbal…”? All articles are verbal — unless there’s a journal of legal gestures I don’t know about. Likely they mean “oral,” but for a Harvard journal of legal analysis not to be precise — okay, picky — about its terms is, well, unsettling.)