The Heck with Those Rules
One of the themes of this blog is that — even though lawyers are authors and law firms are publishers — they don’t follow some of the most basic rules of publishing.
Case in point. Ross Buckley, professor of law at the University of New South Wales and editor of a series of books on global trade and finance, has written this article about how law students make such lousy editors.
His gripe? The editors of law reviews do something that professional editors wouldn’t dare do — a substantive edit of an academic article.
Buckley talks of the “horror” he experienced when he reviewed “the edited manuscript of my first article accepted by a U.S. law review.”
The editors had rewritten much of it, to “improve the readability and clarity of expression.” It was perhaps a tad easier to read. It was also wildly inaccurate.
It should be easy enough to end his problem. Just remind the law students who function as “editors” of law reviews that editing an article must be done with the same sort of care used to edit a legal brief. Put simply, don’t change a danged thing unless it’s an obvious misspelling, or a singular/plural disagreement, or a dangling modifier, or some such. Anything else the editor might question should be flagged (for the author’s review), but not changed.
That’s how the pros do it.
Here’s an idea: See how student-editors in other technical fields are trained. See how mathematicians and engineers and doctors train their student-editors. See if they aren’t trained to take greater care than the law school’s student-editors.
