Legal academia is full of brilliant scholars doing important work. But a small group of law professors have done something rather unusual: getting past the notoriously demanding referees at the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Review of Financial Studies—the most selective peer-reviewed finance journals in the world.

These three journals sit at the pinnacle of financial economics. They reject roughly 94% of submissions. The review process is grueling, often requiring multiple rounds of revision over several years. Success requires not just a good idea, but the technical chops to execute rigorous empirical or theoretical work that satisfies finance PhDs who’ve spent their careers in a mathematically demanding field—one that has produced Nobel laureates such as Eugene Fama, Robert Shiller, and Robert Merton.

For law professors—who typically face different training, different incentive structures, and different scholarly conversations—breaking through is a genuine accomplishment. It represents a bridge between two disciplines that don’t always speak the same language.

The first law professor to publish in a top-3 finance journal appears to be Harvard’s Mark Roe, who published seminal work on corporate ownership in the Journal of Financial Economics in 1990. The most published is Lucian Bebchuk (also at Harvard), with ten publications across these journals. But faculty at a growing number of institutions have shown they can compete at the same level—Berkeley, Columbia, Virginia, NYU, Northwestern, Yale, Stanford, Chicago, and others have all placed work in these journals. (more…)