What Makes a Good Editor in Chief Law Review
Existence a law review editor is exciting! Y'all become to work with some of your smartest peers at school, talented legal academics from across the state, and ultimately you're making a contribution to legal scholarship. But sometimes (most of the time?) being a police review editor can be overwhelming. It's not similar you can just Google "how do I law review" to effigy out what you're doing.
That's why nosotros've started interviewing current editors, former editors, and authors to go their opinions and communication on how successful law reviews operate. In this post, we asked Professor Enrique Armijo - Elon University Schoolhouse of Law Associate Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Academic Diplomacy, Affiliate Fellow of the Yale Police Schoolhouse Information Club Project, and former Editor-in-Chief of the North Carolina Law Review - to share some thoughts almost his time as a police force review EIC and at present equally a legal scholar. You tin can read about Professor Armijo's experience beneath:
Reflecting on your fourth dimension equally Editor-in-Main of the North Carolina Law Review, do you lot have any communication for current boards? In your opinion, is in that location annihilation that boards should or shouldn't focus on when preparing their volumes?
The answer to this question has 2 parts. The get-go is what to focus on with the goal of producing a book you tin can be proud of. The 2nd is what to focus on with the goal of making you lot a better lawyer. Readers of this web log might merits to be more preoccupied with the first of those, but I suspect they are actually (and justifiably, in my view) more than preoccupied with the second. And then I'll focus on that one.
2nd-yr law students often wonder, unremarkably in the middle of the night in the library while counting the number of words in a block quote to make sure it'due south 50 words and not 49, and while thinking to themselves "I'm literally the simply person in the world who will care how many words are in this block quote, let alone count them," what is exactly the betoken of all this work. What I tell our students in my role equally advisor to the Elon Law Review, and what I recall all students on a journal should know but might not be able to see in the moment, is that in the editing of others' work you are learning to utilize a level of precision, technical bailiwick, and attending to detail to your own work that the other parts of police school are not equipped to teach you lot. That's the reason that many legal employers focus so much on the police force review credential. Information technology'south non that the students on the law review or other journals are "ameliorate" by that mere fact itself. It'south that you accept learned what it takes to take perfect piece of work product. And the simply manner you tin can learn that is by doing information technology.
Equally a sometime EIC and at present author, is there annihilation you lot try to proceed in mind when y'all work with law review editors?
My perception is that many authors notice the pupil editing process to be taxing, nit-picky, or unnecessarily fourth dimension-consuming. Some of these critiques are fair. Editing cycles can exist also long, and educatee editors often err on the side of more proposed stylistic revisions rather than fewer. This process tends to have a cumulative negative effect on the writer, past whose lights the piece was largely complete; no ane, from my 7-yr-former daughter to a chaired law professor, likes to exist told, "you're not done even so," whether the object of that judgement is a side of peas or a writing project. Editors sometimes insist on citations for every proposition, or parentheticals for every cite, which in an author'due south view ane) lards upwards prose that can exist meticulously pored over—after all, authors are oftentimes former law review editors, and have internalized the lessons referred to in Reply one above; and 2) seems to conflict with many journals' newly constitute obsession with publishing more succinct manufactures.
But in my view these are quibbles. There isn't an commodity I've e'er published that wasn't fabricated better in some way—not just technically, only substantively—past a pupil editor. Of course, from the author side, the marginal utility of having several back-and-forths with a student editor over word pick, missing parentheticals, or another small-scale issue is minimal, especially compared with the utility gained by really working on the next article that hasn't even so been submitted for publication, instead of the article that a periodical has already committed to publish. And students should sympathise that. But I approach every article editing procedure as a collaboration. Information technology's a item kind of collaboration, since the end product has my name on it, not the editors', and I keep that in mind during the editing process. But law review editors want the same thing I do: the best possible piece for their periodical. So I stay in a collaborative frame of mind, equally I would with any colleague—be responsive; see deadlines; explicate my signal of view as to whatsoever areas of disagreement respectfully. I've plant in most collaborations that the people you lot work with tend to meet you lot with the same diligence, free energy, and good faith that you bring to them. By the manner, and speaking selfishly, that'south also the way to get the all-time work out of your editor.
How has being Editor-in-Chief of the N Carolina Police Review had an impact on your career?
Existence an Editor-in-Chief of a periodical teaches you at an early age how you react when y'all are working on a projection that requires many things to exist executed by many dissimilar people at the proper times. Which is a succinct clarification of the process of publishing a periodical on fourth dimension. I always blench when I hear a current or erstwhile EIC make references to "_my_ staff," or "_my_ periodical." These people don't vest to yous by dint of the fact that y'all were lucky enough to win an election earlier a small grouping of loftier-achieving constabulary students. They are your colleagues, and you can't do the work by yourself. Then don't act like you can.
Source: https://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/interview-with-law-review-eic-turned-author/
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