I didn't have much to do yesterday evening, so I decided to test a theory that I have believed for years but never examined: that law review articles tend to avoid using colons, while most student-authored notes and comments use colons.
I have both written and reviewed articles for publication and I have read numerous law review articles and comments in the course of writing my own comments and articles. In doing so, I have seen many titles. From my general experience, it seems that the titles of professor and practitioner-written articles tend to avoid the use of colons, while student-authored work continues to embrace that punctuation mark.
With my free evening, I ignored all of the possible activities that the vibrant city of Los Angeles had to offer and set to work to explore the frequency of colon-use in law review titles. My plan was to look at the most recent issue of the top 16 law journals and law reviews I could find (as ranked by Washington & Lee) and to compare the colon vs. no colon ratio in professor/practitioner-authored articles with the colon vs. no colon ratio in the titles of student-authored notes and comments.
The bright idea of determining whether this had ever been done before did not cross my mind until I was well into my project. I did some searching and found this excellent 2006 article in the best law journal written by Joshua Deahl and Bernard Eskandari. Deahl and Eskandari analyze the titles of a volume of law review articles in ten journals every five years from 1948 through 2003. The authors selected five "elite" law journals and five "second-tier" law journals.
Here is Deahl and Eskandari's graph of colon use in law journal titles:
From their summary of findings comparing titular colon use between articles and notes in elite and second-tier journals:
Since we are most interested in the current state of legal scholarship, the trends over the past decade are especially informative. According to our statistics, the four plotted categories rank in the following order, from lowest to highest percentage of colonized titles: (1) articles in elite journals, (2) articles in second-tier journals, (3) notes in elite journals, and (4) notes in second-tier journals. We suspect most people would rank the expected quality of legal scholarship by category in this same order. This lends further support to the idea that the worse the piece of scholarship, the more likely it is to have a titular colon. Only the "elite articles" clearly stand apart in 2003, with approximately thirty to forty percent fewer articles with colonized titles than each of the other categories.Even though Deahl and Eskandari's methodology is far more rigorous than my spur of the moment project, I decided that a current snapshot of the state of law review titles could serve as a useful comparison and update to Deahl and Eskandari's work (also, I had already written most of the table below and did not want my work to go to waste). I added the "second-tier" journals that Deahl and Eskandary had examined to my sample, although I replaced the Dickinson Law Review (which is no longer being published) with the Penn State Law Review and Denver University Law Review (Dickinson was ranked 112 at the time Deahl and Eskandari published their article, and Penn State and Denver are tied for 111). This gave me a sample size of the most recent issue of 22 journals.
Here are the numbers I found. For professor/practitioner-authored work, I included both articles and essays in my totals. As noted below, I did not include book reviews. Additionally, for the Harvard Law Review, I used the second most recent issue, because the current issue is a Supreme Court 2015 examination and the "In Memoriam:" article, the foreword, and the cases included did not fit cleanly into my article/comment framework. For each publication, I have linked to the page where I found the articles and comments. Take note, however, that some journals only allowed me to link to a "most current issue" page rather than a specific page for a specific issue, so several of these links will be out of date as time goes on.
Law Journal (by Washington & Lee Ranking) | Articles/Essays | Notes/Comments | ||
Colon | No Colon | Colon | No Colon | |
0 | 7 | 0 | 0 | |
Harvard Law Review (not counting book reviews) | 0 | 1 | 1 | 2 |
2 (does not include the "Introduction:" article) | 7 | 0 | 0 | |
1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | |
0 | 2 | 0 | 2 | |
0 | 4 | 2 | 0 | |
3 | 4 | 0 | 0 | |
0 | 2 | 1 | 0 | |
2 | 3 | 1 | 0 | |
3 | 1 | 2 | 0 | |
2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | |
0 | 3 | 0 | 0 | |
0 | 2 | 1 | 1 | |
2 | 0 | 2 | 0 | |
3 | 4 | 2 | 0 | |
1 | 2 | 3 | 2 | |
Penn State Law Review (tied for 111, used instead of Dickinson) | 2 | 2 | 2 | 0 |
Denver University Law Review (tied for 111, used instead of Dickinson) | 2 | 3 | 0 | 0 |
| 3 | 2 | 2 | 0 | |
| 2 | 5 | 2 | 2 | |
| 3 | 4 | 3 | 0 | |
| 2 | 0 | 4 | 2 | |
TOTAL (Elite/Second-Tier) | 19/14 | 45/16 | 15/13 | 9/4 |
Here is the breakdown of the percentages of titles that include colons:
- Elite Articles: 30%
- Second-Tier Articles: 47%
- Elite Notes and Comments: 62.5%
- Second-Tier Notes and Comments: 76%
Some caveats that are hopefully already obvious to readers: these numbers are by no means exhaustive, as they are from only one issue of each journal. Additionally, because I am checking the most recent issues during the fall semester, several of the issues were "symposium" issues, which tended to have a higher ratio of articles to comments. Additionally, the low sample size of notes and comments makes the percentages listed above all the more unreliable. But in the end, this is a blog post and not an article, and I am more than willing to accept grants from anybody who would like me to bolster my methods.
With those unpleasant caveats out of the way, these results are largely consistent with Deahl and Eskandari's findings, with the exception of the Second-Tier Articles percentage. I notice in the Deahl and Eskandari graph, however, that colon use in second-tier articles fluctuated widely since 1990, and this trend downward could be a continuation of that volatility. Ultimately, this snapshot of data confirmed my hypothesis -- that professor and practitioner-written articles tend to avoid using colons while student-authored work trends towards use (indeed, overuse) of that punctuation.
I confess that I fall into the pattern listed above, as the titles of every paper I published as a student included titles. I plan to actively avoid using colons in the titles of my future work, and I urge others to do the same. While Deahl and Eskandari note that avoiding colons is not a guarantee of increased success, removing this punctuation mark generally makes titles less cumbersome.
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