The Volokh Conspiracy

It does not go away. The involuntary convulsions that usually erupt when encountering either typos or especially poor grammar do subside. I, for example, only twitch. Ask my law partner. It drives him insane.

Any spelling or grammatical errors in this post are my own.

It never goes away. The editor should shoot himself/herself now.

And I would like to thank Cass Sunstein, Larry Tribe, Richard Posner, and Bruce Ackerman for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this post.

The trick is to learn the skills without buying into the philosophy.

Being a law review editor teaches you valuable skills and helps you pay attention to details when appropriate. When you write as a clerk or an attorney, your work will be good, and when others ask you to read their work, you will be a good editor.

If you get an inflated sense of the importance of the work of a law review editor, however, the disease will follow you for the rest of your life. You're not Jason Bourne with a Bluebook, whose killing machine reflexes take over when triggered by the right stimulus. Going to singles bars and telling people that you can spot an improperly italicized comma from across the street won't do you any good, and you shouldn't want it to. Being a good editor doesn't make you "cool," and to revel in your nerdiness in a self-congratulatory way while in law school will only ensure that the disease never leaves your mind.

Prof. Kerr asked for substantive feedback, iirc, not nitpicky editing help. The Green Bag has its own editors, and the disease has taken at least a few minutes of this person's life that s/he will never get back.

"Once you have learned to distinguish a regular period from an italicized period, you can't just start pretending they're the same."

Yes, but you can stop pretending that the difference matters when it shows up in other people's work that no one's asked you to edit.

These things will even hurt you as a lawyer. Suppose you're litigating a case. You get the other side's motion and you have to respond. You have the beginnings of a good substantive rebuttal in your mind, but that involuntary impulse just won't go away, and you can't get to work until you've gone through your opponent's motion with a red pen and corrected his/her Bluebooking... The costs of the disease aren't limited to interactions with laypeople. The former law review editor disease is a combination of OCD, delusions of grandeur, and the pathological ____-measuring contest that much of the legal profession is. The worst part of the disease is that it causes these people not to want to be cured. You say you're sorry, but you're not. Deep down inside, you're giving yourself a pat on the back for correcting the typing of the great Orin Kerr, and being the first one to notice, because you're a highly-trained Bluebooking machine. The first step is to admit--honestly, to yourself--that you have a problem.

I would settle for getting people to stop making up rules that don't exist in order to unnerve others.

As for the basic problem, take a real document design class and learn how to play with fonts. It's useless for legal work, but it's so much fun that you'll stop caring about bolded periods and colons.

I've edited lots of stuff, and can easily spot the errors in what others write. (If only I had the same eye when reading my own stuff!) It's a good great "disease" to have.

And it's not the compulsion some people have to point out the errors that is the problem. Your correspondent pointed out the errors with tact and more than a bit of self-deprecation. Right on.

It's the people who lack such discretion that are annoying. It's the people who seem to think that, because they have a legal education or work in the law, that they have this prestige. This, "I have the keys to the universe" attitude. These "keeper of the keys" then feel compelled to rattle these keys. That's when, of course, they are not counting someone else's keys.

For example, one commenter, above, couldn't merely say, "I got some good advice from a crim law prof." Instead, s/he had to show that his/her prof was worthy to give such advice. He was worthy, of course, because he authored an important law review article. (How one's authorship of law review articles is a proxy for the ability to give life advice is a mystery to me. But people who view legal accomplishments as a proxy for everything do not view this as mysterious.)

A homeless person might give me as good - or even better - advice than the crim prof who wrote the Great American Law Review Article. If I want to know about crim law, I'd talk to the crim prof. If I wanted to know about suffering or hard knocks, I'd talk to the homeless person.

It's the people who think that because they have legal knowledge and experience, they are somehow "different" from "non-lawyers" who are the warped ones.

Sure, it's difficult to have a detailed discussion of constitutional law with people lacking the formal education. Just as it's hard for doctors to discuss medical issues with lawyers.

But life is so much richer than the law. A legal education warps a person only when he forgets that.

When you go home at the end of the day, and your significant other says "How was your day, dear?", the proper answer is NOT: "What exactly do you mean by 'day,' honey? By 'day' do you mean the most recent 24 hour period, or do you refer to the most recent interval during which the sun was shining?"

Sorry, but people who need to be told this have some pretty deep issues. Here's my theory: People with low self-esteem enter law school. Once they have a law degree, they might not feel self-confident; but they feel they have something others don't. Thus, they start calling everyone "non-lawyers" and "lay people" - even to their faces. "Well, to a non-lawyer, this might not make sense."

Except in very limited circumstances, the world does not need to be divided into lawyers and non-lawyers. If you're at a bar, you're just a person - legal education or not. The person sitting next to you, likewise, is just a person. Act accordingly.

The trick is to learn the skills without buying into the philosophy.

This is exactly right. Being an editor is a great thing. Having a law degree is a great thing. Being a lawyer is a great thing.

Thinking that the above is all that matter in life is folly.

As a former editor-in-chief, I think there is a significant difference between the ability to edit on a nitpicky basis, and the judgment as to when it is appropriate to do so. Good legal writing should clearly communicate its point without unduly disrupting the reader--does an extra space, missing period, or inconsistent use of colons in headers really prevent the author from communicating his position? The amount and quality of editing also needs to take into account the target audience--a brief to a state supreme court should be more thoroughly edited than a memo to the file. As a practical matter, a certain minimal level of competence is expected by judges; while a superior technical writing effort might be more effective, it is not a guarantee of prevailing, and in fact may hinder the lawyer from working on the substantive portions of the argument.

Elevating form over substance is usually a path to failure.

I was in public affairs for four years before going to law school, so an anal-retentive view of editing had already been hardwired into my brain. I frankly view it as a tremendous boon -- far preferable to the "OMG!!! u got to be kiddin me" text-messaging crap that passes for writing these days.

I was in public affairs for four years before going to law school, so an anal-retentive view of editing had already been hardwired into my brain. I frankly view it as a tremendous boon -- far preferable to the "OMG!!! u got to be kiddin me" text-messaging crap that passes for writing these days.

I feel compelled to edit that. The proper form is

OMG!!1 u gotta b kidn me ;)

I concur with the above comments that this does not go away. But let me note two benefits. First, in your practice, you can usually spot a grammatical error or other typo in any document, thereby allowing you to "prove" to clients and other lawyers that you have actually read the document your timesheet claims you have read. Second, you can laugh about these things if you happen to marry, or are otherwise become involved with, another lawyer, or even a non-lawyer who is anal a stickler (in my case, a language teacher who is grammatically inclined). In contrast to kd, above, I do not offer to correct errors such a "Saturday's." Instead, my wife and I simply get a nice chuckle from pointing them out to each other.

Now that I'm an author, rather than editor, of law review articles, I'm much more cavalier about citation forms. Especially when I'm trying to cut down my word count!

If anybody needs revenge on these anal-retentive types, just send them to one of these sites, and wait for their heads to explode:

Apostrophe Abuse
lowercase L
Literally, A Web Log
and my favorite,
The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks

(disclaimer: I didn't make law review... I don't think I harbor a grudge, but you never know)

It hasn't gone away for me yet. Those who can't properly italicize see, e.g., are no longer my friends.

Moot court sounds like its much more fun than law review.

Moot court is much more fun than law review. I didn't even bother trying out for our 2 journals.

While my classmates were checking citations for hours on end, I was out working on real cases with real outcomes. They can theorize about, for example, a 1983 lawsuit all day. I actually know how to litigate one, from both the Plaintiff's and Defendant's side.

If the law review editor wanted to make like a real editor, he would have dealt with more substantive issues than whether a stop was italicized or not. For instance, he might have said something about how the article describes captions:

The Caption: The first part of the case is the title of the case, known as the “caption.” Examples include Brown v. Board of Education and Miranda v. Arizona. The caption usually tells you the last names of the person who brought the lawsuit and the person who is being sued. For example, if Ms. Smith sues Mr. Jones, the case caption may be Smith v. Jones (or, depending on the court, Jones v. Smith).

He might have wrote, "the examples don't match the explanation. Arizona is a state, not someone's last name. And who's ever heard of a last name like Board of Education? Plus, the phrase "the last names of the person" is awkward. It makes the reader pause.

Better it would be to word that paragraph like so:

The Caption: The title of the case is known as the “caption.” It identifies the "parties" to the case, otherwise known as the "litigants." Examples include Brown v. Board of Education and Miranda v. Arizona. In cases between individuals, the caption includes the last names of the litigants. If Ms. Smith sues Mr. Jones, the caption is likely to be Smith v. Jones (or, depending on the court, Jones v. Smith).

Note that he would have reduced the number of words in that paragraph by better than 20%, which is a right, good thing for an editor to do.

But he probably would have been better off to end his message with his praise of the essay.