Shorter is better

Prof. Ross Buckley has an interesting paper on SSRN calling for U.S. law reviews to become peer reviewed. In reading his article, I was struck by his observation that the higher-quality, more substantive published articles tend to be shorter:

A move to peer review would ... tend to counter the love of length these journals exhibit. Size is all well and good, in its place, but clear communication is rarely promoted by it. An expert is qualified to assess the worth of an argument, and not substitute length and number of footnotes as measures of quality. An expert would also typically object to having to read a 25,000 word piece.
...

If these cutting-edge journals were to go a step further and announce that the preferred length of manuscripts was between 6,000 and 10,000 words, this would provide even further impetus to their ascension. Does anyone really want to write 30,000 words on an incredibly narrow topic ...?  .... Certainly the evidence is that as scholars become more senior their articles become shorter and their footnotes fewer.