Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Law review editors

I have occasionally noted the frustrations of a law professor dealing with student law review editors (e.g., here). In an amusing and thoughtful post with a great story about legal giant Charles Alan Wright, Beldar observes:

How aggressively we student editors wielded our colored pencils (in those pre-PC, typewriter-dependent days) had quite a bit to do with whether we were editing manuscript from a student writer, a junior law faculty member, or an acknowledged superstar of the celestial legal-academic firmament. We were keenly aware with whom we had leverage — and the leverage was (a) inversely proportional to how badly we wanted that author's work in our journal and (b) directly proportional to how badly that author needed to be published by us.

I suspect that's still true today. One of the nice things about my station in life these days is that there aren't many journals that I need to be published by. Harvard Law Review and Yale Law Journal editors, however, are welcome to rewrite my stuff as much as they want! (Heh!)