WASHINGTON — “Would you want The New England Journal of Medicine to be edited by medical students?” asked Richard A. Wise, who teaches psychology at the University of North Dakota.

Of course not. Then why are law reviews, the primary repositories of legal scholarship, edited by law students?

These student editors are mostly bright and work hard, but they are young, part-time amateurs who know little about the law or about editing prose. Yet they are in charge of picking the best articles from among many hundreds of submissions written by professors with authentic expertise in fields the students may never have studied.

James T. Lindgren, a law professor at Northwestern, once put it this way: “Our scholarly journals are in the hands of incompetents.”