The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
Law Students: Interested in Helping With the Journal of Free Speech Law?
Our new Journal of Free Speech Law is faculty-edited, but we'd love to have help from students with proofreading and bluebooking. (We may also need some help with cite-checking, though so far we're having faculty have their own research assistants do that.) We publish both electronically and in print, and our first articles should be out in late July.
If you'd like to join our existing team of Production Editors (this is the title we give, on our site and in our print issues), please e-mail me at volokh@law.ucla.edu. In particular, we'll need several people who can work on our symposium articles over the next several weeks.
As you might gather from the job description, one thing we need is attention to detail. If your mind just absorbs information from written text, and doesn't bother you by alerting you to typos, then this will be a frustrating task for you. On the other hand, if errors just jump off the page at you as you read, you'd be perfect.
I realize that this is not like a normal law review: It will likely involve both less work and less responsibility. On the other hand, you'll get to read what we hope will be very interesting scholarship, participate in the process of publishing it (plus see your name in print on the masthead), and further practice your proofreading skills.
Just to be clear, as with other law reviews, we're looking for volunteers, though we hope that the students who participate will find this professionally valuable.
To get the Volokh Conspiracy Daily e-mail, please sign up here.
Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time. Comments may only be edited within 5 minutes of posting. Report abuses.
Please
to post comments
People actually volunteer for this (redacted)??
It’s like flair—it’s not required but students are expected to do it.
Frankie. What do you think about am M2 editing a surgery journal? That is what these idiots are doing. Obama was law review editor not just a reviewer in law school. Others on the same law review told me he did no work. He was lazy and shiftless they said.
Never heard of second year med students doing anything that substantial, my class fought over the Night Morgue Clerk job, all you had to do was answer the door if they brought in a Corpse, you could study, sleep, and make a righteous 5$/hour. 3rd-4th year I did enter Surgical Residents cases into a Database on a State of the Art McIntosh, again for 5$/hour.
Frank
Harvard Law Dean was an alcoholic. He Tom Sawyered the law students into doing his job. Only the best are worthy of doing this shit job of editing the law review.
If I get the job, can I use the N-word?
Use the N word. This is a free country. A lawyer might get you. Boo. All PC is case.
I don’t think it’s so much a matter of “can” as of “must” (as to mentioning, rather than using): If you’re cite-checking an article and a quote turns out to be mistaken, you’ll need to correct the quote to reflect what the source actually says. If the source says “nigger” or “kike” or “fag” or “motherfucker” or whatever else, that’s what you’ll need to put in the quote. (I suppose that if someone is upset by that and asks to switch to a different article, I’d go along with that; but I’d be pretty disappointed, especially if we were counting on a timely cite-check from the person.)
To be sure, if an author decides to expurgate something, we leave that for the author to decide (assuming the author notes that there is an expurgation). I don’t expurgate in my own articles, but I don’t impose my preferences on our authors. But that’s the author’s call, not the cite-checker’s.
If a law student desires to work for a conservative-religious legal employer (of which there are a bunch, although in aggregate this is a small element of the legal employment universe), this opportunity seems worthwhile and could be great on a resume.
If a law student desires to do anything else, however, this seems more likely to be a stain on the resume.