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.
This Essay is designed to warn new editors of the pitfalls they may encounter in dealing with law review associates and editors and suggest some advice on how to deal with these potential problems.
First-year law students are indoctrinated with the importance of doing well. The reward for high grades during one’s first year of law school is a coveted spot on the law review. However, a new trend in law schools is becoming a member of a specialty law journal. Specialty law journals cater to practitioners, lawyers, and legal scholars within a particular area of the law. The specialty journal is becoming a new forum in which lawyers voice their opinions on how law should be made.
Last year, while perusing the submission policies of several law reviews, I noticed that several of the reviews listed e-mail addresses and encouraged authors to submit manuscripts electronically by email attachment. Noting that the lists of law review names and addresses I traditionally used for my article submissions did not include e-mail addresses, I began to compile a list of my own. In Fall 1999, I wrote to some 180 general-interest law reviews and asked whether they accepted electronic submissions and, if so, whether they would send me their e-mail addresses. Eric W. Young and I compiled the responses and created a Web site of law reviews that accept electronic submissions.
Enhancing the quality of the law review should be a primary goal of every law review. Librarians have expertise that can help your law review staff improve their research skills and can help in the process of training new associates. This Article describes Stetson University College of Law’s model, which you can modify to fit your school’s specific needs.
Student-edited law reviews speak to diverse audiences and serve multiple roles. Practitioners, judges, and law students utilize the invaluable information contained in the pages of law reviews. While law reviews are showcases for academic scholarship, they also are student organizations and commercial enterprises.
Most legal educators would agree that legal writing is a critical component of a law school’s curriculum. While historically inconsequential, legal writing courses have become increasingly important to the educational mission of academia for at least three reasons. First, legal educators better recognize the value of professional skills, including legal writing, research, and analysis. Second, legal educators better appreciate the relationship between legal thought and legal writing in both doctrinal and practice-oriented courses. Third, legal educators better understand that legal writing courses teach the methodology of legal problem-solving and therefore compliment doctrinal courses and the law school’s academic mission.
Imagine that a fugitive on the run from Florida Department of Law Enforcement agents confronts a parish priest in Clearwater and begs for shelter from his pursuers. He claims that he is innocent of the crime for which they accuse him and swears that the agents are pursuing him for personal reasons. He fearfully tells the priest that the agents will kill him if they apprehend him, because he knows something that they do not want released to the media. As the priest and the fugitive speak in hushed tones in front of the altar, a police car screeches to a halt outside the church. The priest bids his charge to wait and steps outside, securing the door behind him. He confronts the officers and tells them not to enter and take the man by force. The priest has given him sanctuary in God’s house. Now what happens? Can the officers push the priest aside, break down the church door, and apprehend the fugitive as he cowers in front of the altar? Can the fugitive take refuge inside the church and escape secular justice when he may in fact be guilty of the crime of which the government accuses him? What about the priest? Does he not have the right to practice his religion, which commands that he help those in need? This Comment will consider these questions.
No child’s birthday party would be complete without playing the amusing game, “pin the tail on the donkey.” Although I stopped playing that game years ago, it seems that federal circuits all over this country are taking jurors, blindfolding them with bad science, spinning them around in a maze of experts, and sending them off in any direction to deliberate and pin a verdict on the truth. Because it is analogous to pinning a tail on a donkey, polygraph evidence has always been a legal Pandora’s box, serving only to disable and disrupt the truth finding process. Accordingly, this Comment advocates excluding polygraph evidence from federal criminal courtrooms and allowing juries to perform their constitutional duty.