Jotwell

The Journal of Things We Like (Lots), better known as Jotwell, is an online legal journal specializing in short reviews of recent scholarship relevant to the law. It is run from the University of Miami School of Law and appears at jotwell.com. Unlike many typical law journals, most of which are edited by students, Jotwell is primarily edited by the faculty editors of each section.

Overview

Founded in 2008, Jotwell publishes short reviews (or “jots”) by law professors of what they believe to be the best recent scholarship relevant to their field. These jots are typically 500–1,000 words.

Jotwell is organized into sections, each reflecting a subject area of legal specialization, such as constitutional law, corporate law, and intellectual property law. Each section is managed by section editors with independent editorial control. The section editors select 10-20 contributing editors, each of whom commits to writing once a year, ensuring that every section publishes an article once or twice per month.

The main site, jotwell.com, aggregates the content from all the sections. New articles appear between three and five times per week. All content is available for free and open to reader comment. Jotwell carries no advertising and is supported by the University of Miami School of Law.

Jotwell's editor-in-chief is A. Michael Froomkin, the Laurie Silvers & Mitchell Rubenstein Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Miami School of Law. Jotwell is published using WordPress and a custom theme.

All Jotwell articles are available under a Creative Commons license, the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Jotwell states that its objective is to help academics and others identify the best recent legal scholarship, a task made necessary by the proliferation of law reviews – more than 350 in North America alone. The journal’s mission statement also argues that new scholarly intermediaries are needed now that major journals such as the Harvard Law Review and the Yale Law Journal no longer function as “gatekeepers of legitimacy”.^[1]

In an article published in 2012, Ross E. Davies, a professor at George Mason University School of Law and the editor-in-chief of The Green Bag suggested that if Jotwell were to expand "its coverage to include the best old (as well as new) legal scholarship, and occasionally narrowing its focus to the questions presented in a Supreme Court case, it could produce first rate amicus briefs of scholarship" which would help the Supreme Court find scholarship relevant to its decisions.^[2]

In 2014, the ABA Journal selected Jotwell as one of its 'Blawg 100' - the top legal blogs of 2013.^[3]

Jotwell has also been called an example of a trend towards web-only law journals.^[4] It has been criticized as "highly US-centric" even if "really neat".^[5] Jotwell has also been criticized for focusing too much on "articles placed in top law journals."^[6]

Sections

The number of sections has grown gradually since 2008. Currently the sections—each of which is organized as its own independent blog—are: Administrative Law, Classics, Constitutional Law, Corporate Law, Courts Law, Criminal Law, Cyberlaw, Equality, Family Law, Health Law, Intellectual Property Law, Jurisprudence, Lex (which includes Arbitration, Art & Cultural Property Law, Education Law, Election Law, Energy Law, Environmental Law, Immigration Law, Librarianship & Legal Technology and native Peoples Law), Legal History, Legal Profession, Tax Law, Tort Law, Trusts & Estates, and Work Law.

References