Law Review

The past two weeks I've been working on editing an article for an upcoming issue of the SMU Law Review, a journal that the law school publishes quarterly. The assignments come in two-week stretches: the first week, you collect all of the sources that the author references in his or her article (which means you track down hard copies in DFW libraries and print articles from the Internet), highlight the exact section that supports his or her factual statements (so that the journal can verify the info on which the author's facts are based), and collate and tab the sources in order in a Source Binder (or several, if the article is big - I had to have three binders for the one I'm currently working on). The second week, you go through and clean up all the references to cases, statutes, articles, books, websites, etc. for the footnotes assigned to you so that they conform to a standard style (this is called "bluebooking," a term derived from the Bluebook, a self-described "Uniform System of Citation"). You also edit the text of the article itself to correct any deficiencies in spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Thankfully, we get a break between each two-week assignment.

It's quite a process. It's also quite time-consuming. However, the Law Review is a fairly prestigious journal, and being selected for a Staff Editor position is an honor. I am one of 47 students selected as Staff Editors for this year's Law Review Association, which publishes two journals. Next year, as a 3L (the designation for a student in their third year of law school - currently, I'm a 2L) I will be eligible for a position on the Editorial or Executive Board.

Here is my setup:

• Source Binders
• Hard copy printout of the article
• My laptop (for quickly referencing the electronic copy of the article in case I can't readily tell whether there really are two spaces between those two words or just one)
• Pens, highlighter, and little yellow flags
• The Bluebook
• Texas Rules of Form (the "Green Book," in case I come across Texas cases)
• The Texas Law Review Manual on Usage and Style (for figuring out exactly where those commas go, and when to use an "en" dash (–) instead of an "em" (—) dash or a hyphen (-); oh, it's that fun)
• An editor's mark-up notation guide
  

Nathan