A faculty scholarship prize is a low- (or no-) cost way of encouraging and recognizing faculty members who are doing great work. For each of the last 6 years, my school has sponsored a scholarly paper competition, judged by outside reviewers on a "blind" basis.
Here's how it works. During or after each spring semester, the Dean’s Office issues a call for submissions. Works eligible for consideration in that year’s competition are those that are (1) published between July 1 of the preceding calendar year and June 30 of the current calendar year; or (2) accepted for publication in a volume that, by virtue of its date, volume or number, is scheduled to appear before June 30 of the current calendar year. That means, for example, that an article that has been accepted for publication in the "May 2011" or “Spring 2011” volume of a particular law review is eligible for the 2011 competition, even if the publishing journal does issue the hard copy of the volume until, say, November 2011. Book chapters can be substituted for scholarly articles.
The judges for the competiton are at least 2 faculty members from other law schools, chosen by the Dean. The Dean tries to select folks who have a wide view of scholarship (which means that research deans at other schools are particularly vulnerable to being asked — sorry Jacqui!). The third judge is also chosen by the Dean, and can be a faculty member at another school, a judge or practicing lawyer. We've had experience with all three types of folks as the third judge. Because most of the works under consideration are published or available on SSRN, the judges are asked to refrain from taking any active steps to gather information that would tend to identify the author of the work. Could the judges discover the identity of the paper's author? Yes, but we hope they won't.
The 3 judges are meant to choose the "best" article, however they define that term. Despite the looseness in the criteria, there has been strong consensus among the judges each year on which paper should win. The judges do not provide written feedback on the papers. The actual prize is a small cash reward and the inscription of one's name on a plaque displayed in the scho0l.
I have heard of scholary paper competitions at other schools where the "best" paper is chosen by the Dean or Associate Dean, or determined on the basis of article placement (i.e., a placement in a journal at a school with the highest US News ranking — not sure how specialty journals factor into the mix). I favor the outside reviewers model for two reasons. First, outside reviewers minimize (but admittedly do not eliminate) the appearance of some bias. Second, outside reviewers do not (inherently) raise or replicate problems presented by US News rankings, the law review article selection process, comparisons of speciality journals to flagship journals, and comparative "rank" of symposium placements vs. competitive placements, to name a few. Admittedly, the outside-reviewer model relies on the good graces of national colleagues willing to judge the competition, but so far, all of the judges who have been invited to participate have been gracious and willing. One person who was too busy to judge the competition in a particular year agreed to do it the next year.
At my school, we have only one scholarly paper competition for all faculty members, but I could see having more than one. It could be feasible to have one prize for private law topics and one for public law topics, or one for work by faculty who have been teaching for x or fewer years and one for faculty who have been teaching for more than x years. At some schools, there is also a prize for adjunct faculty scholarship (not sure how many adjuncts are able to write scholarly papers, though).
It shouldn't be like a fun run, where everyone who participates gets a ribbon, but what are some other ideas for recognizing faculty scholarship? What other variations are out there?
I've heard second-hand of a school giving cash awards ($5,000, if I recall correctly) for placing an article in a top journal (with the "top journals" actually spelled out ahead of time). That has the obvious downside of the poor fit between placement and quality, but it avoids the administrative problem of selecting best articles. Plus, if a professor places multiple articles in top journals each year, that professor can start making some serious money from the deal.
I've heard of this too, Orin, but I personally tend to like Bridget's model better, largely because I really do prefer the focus to be on quality rather than placement and I don't think there's a terrible administrative problem with selecting best articles for quality if you use a handful of external judges. Also, there seems to be increasing evidence coming out that women faculty at least tend not to do as well placing articles in "top" journals for whatever reason (may be they're less "impressive" to journal editors or they write in more specialty areas that general "top" journals don't publish that often). Perhaps you could get around this by careful definition of "top" journals but I'm skeptical about that. The models I've heard about along the lines you raised seem to all be based on "Top [20/30/40] general journals as ranked by the U.S. News or Expresso".
Jacqueline,
I think there are definitely problems with using top journals as a proxy. I'm not sure that gender bias is one of them, but I think there is definitely a subject-matter bias. On the other hand, there are also problems with relying on other scholars. For example, the nature of the articles selected on the JOTWELL website suggest that professors are strongly inclined to prefer articles that agree with their own views, creating a real problem that the selection of the outside reviewers will strongly influence which paper gets picked. There are no good solutions, I think, only choices among least bad options.
But is the selection of articles on JOTWELL necessarily analogous to the scholarship award Bridget described? She is not talking about SELECTING articles, but about ranking them. Thus, there could be some common issues eg people may rank articles higher that agree with their own views, but at least it's a much more closed system than the article selection process and may include a broader array of topics/views. Judges may have to rank, say, six articles and not agree with the points of view in four or five of them. Judges will also have to rank articles in whatever fields are submitted in a given year, so subject matter bias is less of a problem than in top journals.
Also, the research dean may be aware of the bias problem and may try and select a variety of judges with different views and interests from year to year. Changing judges from year to year may also make a difference vis-a-vis, say, the JOTWELL selection system. Maybe another way to help would be to ask judges to score papers on a set of criteria with a number of points notionally allotted to each of them. That's how it works with a number of peer-reviewed journals (particularly interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journals).
And judges in a competition such as Bridget describes can be asked to do a blind peer review of articles submitted in any given year, unlike law review editors who may focus more on the identity of particular authors for whatever reason.
In any event, I agree that there's no perfect way of doing this, but I think that careful selection of judges from year to year to focus on quality, and perhaps a set of selection criteria, would be better than relying on the biases inherent in the law-review editing process. [There is also an emerging literature, including empirical data, on selection bias against women writers in top law journals and I'm increasingly convinced by it. That, in itself, may be partially explained by subject-matter bias, but not entirely.]