Little scholarship focuses on the actual experience of creating a dynamic law review or journal. What little that has been printed about journals focuses specifically on over-editing and has been written by professors who may have their own best interests in mind.1 This Article offers concrete advice for new journal editors and begins what I hope is a series of articles educating students who are eager to learn a new craft. Law students who are ambitious enough to join a journal staff do not always have an editorial background or training; that is, the majority were not professional editors or publishers before attending law school. Nevertheless, the institution of law school expects these inexperienced new staff members and editors to know what articles to choose immediately, which authors to solicit, and how to add to an article’s validity through cite checks and line editing. Some student editors handle the implied standards of excellence by pretending that they know what to do, while others repeat the previous year’s editorial techniques and mistakes. In the end, most spend an enormous amount of time reading, editing, and then re-editing and worrying about their work.
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Editor. The very word conjures up images of an older man with a starched white shirt hunched over a manuscript, a permanent scowl on his face. Or perhaps a strait-laced woman, again older, hair pulled back tight in a bun, her red pen mercilessly lining out words and correcting mistakes. Editing. That word may bring similar images to mind, but it is more likely to be associated with one’s own late night efforts to give a painfully extracted draft a final hard look, hoping to catch the extra “e” in “judgement” that spell check misses, trying to spot spacing errors in citations, and double-checking page numbers for quotations.
Working with citations is a fact of life on law journals. Because citation work is detail-oriented, requires great concentration, and is sometimes perceived as “drudge work,” it often generates a high level of frustration among law review staff, editors, and authors. This Article will address the primary frustrations suffered by each group and will propose solutions for alleviating those frustrations.
I am pleased to have been asked to speak to all of you tonight. Law review dinners are very special occasions for me. I was editor in chief of the University of Chicago Law Review when we planned the first law review dinner in our history. As toastmaster of the event, I likened our humble organization to a corporation, with our law review alumni as the equivalent of stockholders. One guest immediately shouted out that the dividends were lousy. Then I introduced Robert Maynard Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago and former boy-wonder of Yale Law School, whose dean he had been at the age of thirty and where he had been a law review editor. He advised all of us that no one ever knows as much or is as certain of that knowledge as a law review editor. Fortunately, he told us, the disease lasts only a year and returns only when you become a judge. Then I called on our law school dean, Edward Levi, and he read a promotional form letter from Harvard Law School, addressed to Dean Levi as the dean of one of those law schools who did not have a law review of their own. Because of our deprived state, Harvard offered to let the students and faculty of the University of Chicago subscribe to the Harvard Law Review at a greatly reduced subscription price.
Those of you who are connected with the National Conference of Law Reviews deserve hearty congratulations. As we mark the turn of the century, Americans can celebrate, among other things, the stability and advances of the United States legal system, an achievement that speaks loudly to the successes of legal institutions, the enduring, yet flexible, nature of our laws, and the soundness of legal education. You—the leading students of our law schools—now carry the heavy mantle and must perpetuate and improve our legal system during the twenty-first century.
An editor in chief (EIC) must master many administrative tasks. At most, an EIC has only one year to learn how to manage a law review, do the job, and then train a replacement. Because of the workload, the relative brevity of an EIC’s tour of duty is both a blessing and a curse.
If there is one piece of advice that any incoming editor in chief should accept, it is this—be prepared. From the moment you step into your new role, there will be many expectations you need to fulfill. The executive board expects you to be a competent leader who is dedicated to the law review; the school and community expect you to publish in a timely fashion; the membership expects you to consider their competing commitments and responsibilities. You must be prepared to deal with these expectations and to figure out the best way to fulfill them.
President Harry S. Truman, upon learning of his predecessor’s death and subsequently being sworn in as the Nation’s president, stated to a crowd of reporters, “Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. . . . [W]hen they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.” Truman’s eloquent quote describes my own feelings about being selected as the University of Missouri-Kansas City Law Review’s editor in chief. Although the awesome responsibilities held by the Nation’s chief executive officer dwarf those of a law review editor in chief, this fact did not help to alleviate my own anxiety. As a staff member, I merely Bluebooked articles and made feeble attempts at crafting them. My background possessed no indicia of editorial experience. Yet, I was expected to oversee an established law journal with more than fifty members. To say I felt a bit overwhelmed would be an understatement.
I remember accepting my law review’s managing editor position as if it were yesterday. I could not wait to implement my new ideas and “shape-up” the law review. I was young, I was hungry, I was . . . well, I was completely overwhelmed. The outgoing managing editor was, in my mind and everyone else’s mind, the standard by which all managing editors should be measured. I, on the other hand, was not technically proficient; I did not know the Bluebook by heart. I often heard, though it did not need to be said, “You’ve got big shoes to fill.”
Welcome to management! Odd as it may sound, this is the most appropriate greeting for new student works editors. Your previous law school experiences have consisted almost entirely of challenges and obstacles that you have overcome by individual effort. As editors, however, you will be judged by the output of others. Good editors, by definition, are those who ensure that their writers produce “on time and on target”—that they produce quality works in a timely manner. This Essay suggests ways of dealing with the difficulties you likely will encounter in overseeing the work of other students.