Legal scholarship is an outlier in the modern research landscape: the single-authored law review article remains the default, even as biomedical, natural-science, and most social-science fields have moved decisively toward multi-author, multi-role teams formalized by frameworks like CRediT and the ICMJE authorship criteria. This isn’t a gap in legal academia’s awareness of collaborative norms elsewhere — it’s a distinct disciplinary tradition, with its own reasons and its own, genuinely growing, exceptions.
This guide is for research administrators, academic librarians, and interdisciplinary researchers who need to understand why legal scholarship’s authorship conventions look different from the ones CASRAI documents elsewhere on this site, and where that difference is narrowing.
What the data shows
A large-scale study of law review co-authorship covering 1980–2020, published in the Virginia Law Review, found that solo authorship accounted for roughly 94% of articles in the 1980s, falling to roughly 86% by the 2010s — a real, sustained decline, but one that leaves single authorship solidly dominant throughout the period. Correspondingly, the co-authored share roughly tripled, from about 5% in the early 1980s to over 15% by 2019. The absolute growth is more dramatic than the percentage shift suggests: multi-author articles roughly quadrupled in volume across the period, while solo-authored output grew by a much smaller margin, and the average number of co-authors per active scholar rose as well.
Two caveats matter for anyone using these figures. First, they describe student-edited law reviews specifically — the venue this guide is scoped to. Peer-reviewed legal journals, a much smaller slice of legal publishing, reportedly show meaningfully higher co-authorship rates than student-edited reviews, which is itself informative about what’s driving the difference (see below). Second, treat any precise percentage as a documented historical tendency from one dataset, not a fixed, discipline-wide constant — the trend is real and consistent across sources, but exact figures vary by which journals and years a given study samples.
Why single authorship persisted this long
Several structural features of legal scholarship, distinct from STEM or biomedical research, help explain the pattern:
- Doctrinal methodology doesn’t require a team. The traditional law review article is an argument constructed from primary legal sources — statutes, case law, prior scholarship — rather than a study built on data collection, laboratory work, or instrumentation. Where the underlying research design forces division of labor (running experiments, coding a dataset, managing a multi-site trial), co-authorship becomes close to unavoidable, which is exactly the pattern seen in fields CRediT was built for. Doctrinal argument doesn’t impose that structural requirement.
- No ICMJE-equivalent authorship gate exists for legal scholarship. Biomedical publishing enforces authorship eligibility, not just credit allocation — ICMJE’s four-part test determines who may be listed at all. Student-edited law reviews have no comparable, formally adopted authorship-criteria standard; article submission and editorial review focus on scholarly quality and placement, not on adjudicating who substantively contributed enough to be named. That absence removes one of the mechanisms that, in ICMJE-aligned fields, actively normalizes and formalizes shared credit.
- Tenure and hiring culture has historically rewarded solo work as a stronger individual signal. Legal academia’s hiring and promotion process weighs published, sole-authored scholarship heavily as direct evidence of a candidate’s individual analytical and writing ability. A co-authored piece can raise (often unresolved) questions about how to apportion credit for tenure and promotion review in a way a solo-authored piece doesn’t, which is a real disincentive independent of the scholarship’s merits.
- The absence of “big science” infrastructure. Fields with large co-authorship counts (particle physics, genomics, multi-site clinical trials) built that norm around genuinely distributed infrastructure — shared instruments, multi-site data, specialized technical roles. Traditional legal scholarship has no equivalent infrastructure driving team formation by default.
The genuine exceptions
Co-authorship in legal scholarship is not evenly distributed across subfields — it clusters specifically where legal scholarship starts to resemble the empirical, data-driven, or genuinely interdisciplinary research CRediT-based fields already do:
- Empirical legal studies. Research that codes case outcomes, analyzes court data, or runs regressions on legal or judicial behavior imports the methodological logic (and often literally the co-authors) of social science, where multi-author teams combining legal expertise with statistical or research-design expertise are standard. Legal-scholarship co-authorship studies specifically flag the growth of empirical work as a leading driver of the co-authorship increase described above.
- Law and economics. Scholarship applying economic modeling or empirical economic methods to legal questions frequently pairs a law-trained author with an economist, or two economically-trained legal scholars, following co-authorship conventions closer to economics than to doctrinal law.
- Genuinely interdisciplinary work. Scholarship at the intersection of law and public health, science and technology policy, bioethics, or environmental science more often carries co-authors from the partner discipline, for the same reason interdisciplinary work in any field tends toward multiple authors: no single contributor has the full expertise the piece requires.
- Faculty–student and faculty–practitioner co-authorship. A smaller but distinct pattern — law faculty co-authoring with law students, research fellows, or practitioners — that raises its own, separately debated questions about how credit and intellectual contribution should be recognized when the co-authors sit at very different career stages within the same institution.
Author order when law reviews do co-author
Where legal scholarship co-authors, byline order convention is less standardized than in ICMJE-aligned fields, where first- and senior-author positions typically signal specific contribution roles. Some empirical and law-and-economics legal scholarship follows the alphabetical-listing convention long documented in economics, rather than ordering by extent of contribution. Student-edited law reviews generally don’t impose a house rule on author order the way many biomedical journals now require a documented contribution statement — a further sign of how much less formalized authorship mechanics remain in this corner of scholarly publishing.
Why this matters for research administrators
A few practical implications follow directly from the pattern above:
- Don’t apply STEM-style authorship-order or contribution-statement expectations to a law review CV entry by default — solo authorship on a legal scholarship line is the norm, not a red flag, and doesn’t carry the same signal it might on a biomedical CV where near-universal multi-authorship makes a lone name unusual.
- When a law faculty member’s CV does show co-authored work, check the subfield before assuming it reflects a lab-style collaboration — it’s disproportionately likely to be empirical, law-and-economics, or genuinely interdisciplinary scholarship, which is useful context for research-output review, tenure files, and interdisciplinary center reporting.
- If your institution’s authorship-dispute or credit-allocation policy is written around ICMJE or CRediT (common in institutions with strong biomedical or STEM output), recognize it likely has no direct analogue in how the law school handles authorship questions — there is no equivalent formally adopted standard to point to for a law review co-authorship dispute the way there is under ICMJE or COPE.
Frequently asked questions
Is co-authorship becoming more common in law reviews?
Yes, on the available evidence. Multiple sources documenting legal-scholarship co-authorship trends since 1980 report a sustained increase in the co-authored share of articles, roughly tripling over four decades, even though single authorship remains the clear majority pattern.
Why don’t law reviews use ICMJE-style authorship criteria?
ICMJE’s authorship criteria were built for biomedical research specifically, where contributor roles (data acquisition, analysis, drafting) are more clearly separable and authorship-eligibility disputes are common enough to need a shared standard. Student-edited law reviews evolved separately, with editorial review focused on the quality and placement of a submitted argument rather than adjudicating contributor eligibility, and no comparable body has proposed or adopted an equivalent standard for legal scholarship specifically.
Do law schools value solo-authored articles more for tenure and hiring?
Reporting on legal-academy hiring and promotion consistently describes solo-authored, published scholarship as the strongest conventional signal of a candidate’s individual analytical and writing ability, which is a commonly cited reason single authorship remains the safer default for a scholar building a tenure record, independent of any judgment about the intrinsic quality of collaborative work.
How is author order decided on a co-authored law review article?
There’s no field-wide rule. Some empirical and law-and-economics legal scholarship follows the alphabetical-order convention common in economics; other co-authored pieces order by contribution or seniority. Unlike ICMJE-aligned biomedical journals, student-edited law reviews generally don’t require a documented contribution statement that would make the ordering logic explicit to readers.
Related CASRAI resources
- Sole authorship — the dictionary definition and its use across disciplines
- Co-authorship
- ICMJE Authorship Criteria: The 4 Requirements
- CRediT vs ICMJE authorship — what is the difference?
- Author Order in China, Japan, and Korea: How It Differs from the West — another look at how authorship conventions vary by context rather than following one universal standard
- Team Science and the Science of Team Science (SciTS) — the opposite end of the spectrum, where formal multi-PI structure is the default
- CRediT & Authorship Attribution — the cluster hub for authorship and contribution-credit standards generally
