Jle Referee Strategy

Referee Strategy (jle-referee-strategy)

When to trigger

• The paper is near submission and you want to stress-test it against the referees it will draw
• You need to decide which robustness/legal-design checks to run before submitting vs. hold in reserve
• An R&R arrived and you must map referee concerns to concrete responses
• You want to understand how JLE's single-blind process shapes strategy

How JLE review works (plan around it)

JLE uses single-blind review: the authors' identities are visible to referees (the title page carries your name), while referees stay anonymous (检索于 2026-06；以官网为准). This changes strategy in two ways. First, do not anonymize the manuscript — that is the AEJ/JLEO reflex, not JLE; the title page should name you. Second, because referees know who you are, your track record and your self-citations are visible, so positioning honestly and not over-claiming matters more, not less. Referees here are economists who also know the legal institution; the modal report attacks (1) whether the institution is described correctly and the rule really binds, (2) the credibility of the legal identification, then (3) magnitude/mechanism and external validity across jurisdictions. Pre-empt the predictable objections in the paper itself.

The objection map (pre-empt in the paper)

Strategy craft

1. Get the institution right first. A law-and-economics referee will dismiss a paper that misstates how the rule works before reaching the econometrics; have an economist-readable, accurate institutions section.
2. War-game the legal identification. For each identifying assumption, write the sentence a hostile referee would use; if you cannot answer it in one paragraph + one exhibit, fix it before submitting.
3. Pre-empt, do not hide. Address the obvious weakness (the contaminated control, the few-states inference) head-on in the text.
4. Sequence robustness. Decisive legal-design checks (re-dating, control-jurisdiction swaps) in the main paper; secondary ones in the appendix.
5. Anticipate the cross-jurisdiction external-validity ask — almost guaranteed for a single-state or local design; have the estimand and scope ready.
6. Make replicability visible so specification-search suspicion is defused.
7. Signal institutional credibility. Because the modal referee knows the law, a careful primary-source institutions section (or genuine institutional expertise on the author team) signals you will not be caught mis-stating the rule — the fastest way to lose a law-and-economics referee.

What single-blind changes about strategy

Single-blind review is not a neutral detail — it shifts several decisions:

• Your reputation enters the read. A junior author cannot hide behind anonymity, and a senior author cannot coast on it; the paper must stand on its identification regardless. Do not assume name recognition substitutes for a clean design.
• Self-citation is honest, not masked. You can cite your own prior work normally (no "Author (2023)" contortions), which makes positioning cleaner — but it also means a referee sees exactly how this paper relates to your earlier ones, so the marginal contribution must be real.
• Tone is visible and remembered. Because the editor and (often) the field know who you are, a defensive or sloppy submission carries a reputational cost a blinded one does not.
• Suggested/excluded reviewers. If Editorial Manager invites reviewer suggestions, use them substantively — name people who know the institution, not just friendly economists.