Academic Legal Writing - Eugene Volokh [130]
This makes it especially important to manage your time wisely. You need to have the time to select a topic, do your research, write several drafts, and (if the instructor allows it) have your instructor read and comment on at least one draft. So look at the timeline on pp. 104–104, adjust it to your seminar's timetable, and stick to it.
E. Turning the Paper into a Publishable Article
Once you've written a seminar term paper, publish it. You've done the work; why not get an extra credential out of it?
Don't worry if you aren't on law review. If your paper is any good, you can get it published in some outside journal (see Part XXIII.A, p. 261). You might not get into the top law reviews, but a publication in a specialty journal or a second-tier journal is better than no publication.
You'll probably need to do some extra work to make the paper publishable. For instance, if your instructor let you skip explaining the legal background, you might need to fill in that section. But generally this isn't hard, since you've already thought through the problem, done the research, and written the paper. Even a law firm memo can be turned into a law review article (see Part XX), though the two are very different genres. A seminar paper is much closer to an article already.
Obviously, if you're planning to do this, ask your professor for advice: He might have suggestions that he never mentioned when the discussion was focused only on your writing a student paper. Better still, if you plan from the beginning to turn the seminar paper into an article, talk to your professor about this up front. He may have ideas about your choice of a claim and your organization that he won't bring up unless he thinks about the paper eventually becoming publishable.
XXII. CITE–CHECKING OTHERS' ARTICLES
A. Recommendations for Cite–Checkers
Part XVII applies not just to your own work, but also to articles that you're cite-checking for a law journal.
Cite-checking is important, and should be done thoroughly and thoughtfully. Checking authors' sources is part of what law journals owe the legal profession. Lawyers, judges, academics, and students rely on the accuracy of journal articles. (Scholars writing their own articles might check the original sources cited by the articles they read, but most readers don't have the time to do that.) Your journal's name attached to the article is an assurance by the journal that the article has been thoroughly checked.
Checking the sources is part of what you owe the author. Most authors count on cite-checkers to help catch their errors before the errors appear in print and become public embarrassments.
Checking the sources is part of what you owe your fellow journal members (past, present, and future), because embarrassing errors reflect badly on the journal as well as on the author.
Checking the sources is part of your legal education, since it helps you develop a careful and skeptical perspective that will help you in your own legal research and writing. It's easier to find errors in others' work than in your own; checking someone else's work is the best practice you can have for your own article and your future memos or briefs.
Finally, catching an author, especially some respected academic, in an error, and then (politely) suggesting that he correct the error can be rewarding—you can justly feel good about preventing embarrassment and misinformation.
So when you're cite-checking, you should look out for the same problems that I outline above:
1. If an article cites an intermediate source, find the original source, check the article's assertion against the original source, and suggest that the author cite the original source as well as the intermediate one.
2. Particularly carefully check articles citing