Academic Legal Writing - Eugene Volokh [131]
3. Make sure that the article describes facts accurately, without using false synonyms, omitting important qualifiers, or relying on vague terms.
4. To the extent possible, investigate the soundness of the studies on which the article relies. If you see a weakness in the study, or find seemingly cogent criticisms of the study, urge the author to correct or clarify the article, or at least to briefly respond to the objection.
5. Look closely for unstated assumptions that the article makes when it draws inferences from the evidence, and suggest that the author make these assumptions explicit.
6. Think about how readers might misinterpret the article's assertions, and suggest that the author clarify the assertions to avoid such misinterpretations.
Of course, you'll need to use your judgment about how far you should go on all these points—how much effort you should invest in source-checking, how many suggestions you feel comfortable making to the author, and how many of those suggestions you insist on. My recommendations are:
a. Cite-check thoroughly, since that's part of your duty.
b. Err on the side of making more suggestions rather than fewer; the author will generally appreciate your input (especially since it represents an objective outside judgment), and, at worst, will just decline some of your proposed changes.
c. Insist only on those suggestions that you think are needed to prevent genuine errors or very probable reader misunderstandings.
d. Present your case politely, and leave room for compromise language.
e. Never make corrections without informing the author and giving the author a chance to reject or modify them, even if you think that the corrections are obviously necessary.
Fairly thorough cite-checking is one advantage that law has over other disciplines. In most other fields, editors don't systematically check the article's use of sources, though they might check the overall logic of the argument, and might object to factual claims that they themselves know to be false.
Some of the cautionary examples in Part XVII came from publications that don't do cite-checking; Crime and Justice is a faculty-edited journal that relies on authors to check their own sources, and some of the other sources were books, which generally aren't cite-checked by the publishers. Law review cite-checking isn't perfect (consider the student note that I gave as an example in Part XVII.J, p. 190), but it's better than nothing. And you can make it better still.
B. Recommendations for Law Review Editors
Few people come to law school as good cite-checkers. Critically checking sources is a skill that incoming law review members need to learn, and law review editorial boards are the ones who must teach it.
The material in Part XVII and XXII.A should be helpful for that. I recommend that you tell all new staffers to read these parts and to do the exercises in Part XVII, on pp. 158, 170, 182, and 190 (and perhaps also the editing exercises in Part XVI). You might tell them to first do the exercises without looking at the answers in Appendix II, and then to compare their results against the answers when they're done.
You might also organize a talk in which an editor orally walks the students through those exercises, and explains to them the errors that they were supposed to spot. The site http://volokh.com/writing contains some PowerPoint presentations that might be useful for such a talk.
XXIII. PUBLISHING AND PUBLICIZING
You've written your law review article; what now? (If you're no longer a student, skip the next two subsections and go straight to Part XXIII.A.3, p. 263.)
A. Consider Publishing Outside Your School
1. You can
If the journals at your school decide not to publish your work, submit it to other journals at other schools. Many journals hesitate to publish work by students from other schools, but many will seriously consider it. And many