First Experiences with a Law Journal
Like most of the other 1Ls here, I signed up to work for a law journal. Well, actually, two. Shut up. On Sunday, one of my journals had their first subcite of the year. The group of us assigned to this particular article spent a few hours in the library, checking all the footnotes in an article for proper form and examining the cited sources to make sure they actually support the author’s assertions. Our weapons in this battle against the non-standard citation style of lazy/forgetful law professors? Boxes of red pens, lots of candy, a fair amount of swearing, and The Bluebook, a 400-page pamphlet that explains the citation rules in a clear, simple, internally consistent manner. No, not really.
My initial enthusiasm (”Wow, I get to work with legal scholarship!”) was quickly replaced by confusion about the rules regarding when commas should be italicized and whether a “See BOOK X” needed a pincite or would be better as a “See generally.” Luckily, assorted editor-types were around to answer our questions and guide us along. We finished the first round of cite-checking quickly and with a minimal amount of pain.
The next day, I put on my line editor’s hat (I’m imagining it to look something like this) and went back to work. Line editing involves going over a section of previously subcited pages, attempting to make sense of some other subciter’s chicken-scratch, rechecking citation formats, making grammatical changes as necessary, and entering all these changes into the actual article. I found it more interesting than subciting, simply because I could work with a larger chunk of the article without being interrupted by constant source-checking. Also, the relative quiet of the journal office did wonders for my concentration.
All told, I did almost six hours’ worth of work over the two days, and I enjoyed a lot of it. I can see how the work might get tedious eventually, but so far it’s a nice change of pace from case briefing. It helps that I’ve been assigned to a single article, so I have some idea of the context of the page I’m working on, and I feel somewhat invested in the article. That’s my article. I worked on it. Yeah.
And, I now know that ellipses go space-dot-space-dot-space-dot-space, not dot-dot-dot. Oh, how naive I’ve been.