strategy
We believe that the South Asian Legal Scholarship Project should be promoted as a nationwide effort to encourage applying legal, historical, sociological, economic, and statistical analyses to South Asian American communities. This project’s initial focus is to encourage writing in a legal journal. There are several options that this group has considered in discussing the operation of a South Asian legal journal.
1. Independent Journal - A nationwide organization such as NASABA edits/maintains it
2. Independent Journal - Joint operation between multiple law schools nationwide or regionally
3. Independent Journal - Operate the journal through its own independent 501c3 organization
4. Independent Journal - Operate the journal through one university
5. Team with an existing law journal to test the need and demand for an independent journal
After significant discussion, and with input from some members of the South Asian American legal community, we have concluded that although this effort should be promoted nationwide, a legal journal’s activities is best maintained at a local level, and by students at one university (not necessarily UCLA), but to first test the demand through an existing law journal.
If staffing is low at the school where the journal is maintained, there is an option to transfer or rotate the work to a different school that does not have staffing issues. There is precedent for this strategy (National Black Law Journal was transferred from UCLA to Columbia when staffing was low). Most law journals are maintained by students at universities, mostly because the staffing (cite checking, editing, etc.) is more easily available. It is unlikely that full-time employed attorneys (local SABAs/NASABA/APABA) will have the time to dedicate to journal maintenance and publishing. In addition, a joint and simultaneous effort between multiple schools would be difficult to coordinate and enforce so that the final work product is of the highest quality. The same problem would arise if an independent 501c3 organization maintained the journal.
Although we believe that the project should be implemented by an individual school, this effort benefits the entire South Asian community in the U.S. As part of this effort, we first considered starting an independent South Asian law journal maintained by one school. There are problems with this approach. First, we do not know how much interest and writing there will be for a specialty South Asian law journal. Although we may be able to find writing for one volume, it is uncertain how many volumes could be sustained with quality writing on South Asian issues. Second, it is uncertain whether one school will have an ongoing staff to maintain a South Asian law journal.
Therefore, we have concluded that it is better to support writing that affects South Asian American communities initially through an existing journal. An existing journal, such as the Asian Pacific American Law Journal at UCLA (APALJ), has an existing student staff with a pre-defined publishing schedule. APALJ also has many years of experience in the publishing process, and an existing readership and customer base (including most law schools in the nation). By publishing in APALJ through a Symposium issue on South Asian American Jurisprudence, we can determine whether there is enough interest and support to start an independent South Asian law journal in the future.