Academic Legal Writing - Eugene Volokh [145]
2. Insist on seeing all changes
All the above presupposes that you are aware of all the changes that are being made—as you should be. Politely but firmly ask the editors to mark any changes they make, either on any paper edits that they send you, or through computerized redlining if the edited versions are sent to you electronically. Stress that you'd like to see even tiny changes, and even changes in footnotes.
Most editors are good about showing you all the changes; even if they know they will insist on a change, they know that they should alert you to it and give you a chance to make it the way you want it made. They understand that the article will have your name on it, and that you therefore deserve to sign off on every letter in it.
Unfortunately, editors sometimes neglect this important point, especially when they think that time is short and that some error is particularly glaring. I once got a final round of page proofs a few days before the article was supposed to be sent to the printer, and found that someone had added a whole paragraph to the introduction, without warning me. Had I not been rereading the whole piece carefully, I would have missed the change, and would have had my name attached to some text that I never wrote and never checked. And on top of that, the new paragraph was grammatically incorrect, and was written in a style that jarringly differed from mine.
So politely tell the journal that you need to see all the changes, no matter how minor; and if you see any unannounced changes being made, raise a fuss (again, politely) so that this doesn't happen again.
3. Always keep a copy of any marked–up draft you mail
First, imagine how rotten you'd feel if you spent days marking up a draft, and then the only existing copy of the mark-up got lost in the mail. Second, keeping the copy lets you do what the next subsection suggests.
4. Make sure your earlier changes were properly entered
Whenever you get a new draft, make sure that any changes that were marked on the previous draft were properly entered. Even the best editors make mistakes when they enter changes—and you and the editors are jointly responsible for catching these mistakes.
5. Use the opportunity to edit more yourself
When a law journal publishes an article, it usually sends you two rounds of edits, and then one or two rounds of page proofs.
This is a great opportunity for you to go through some more editing passes yourself. You should have edited the article thoroughly before handing it in to your professor and before sending it out to the journals. But now you've had a few months away from the piece, so it will be easier for you to read it with new eyes; you may have learned more about the subject since then; and you're now incorporating edits from someone else, and these edits might cause new problems. So reread the whole piece thoroughly each time you get it, and mark it up just as you did in your earlier edits—correct substantive errors, clarify vague points, remove redundancy, and improve the wording.
In some very late editing passes, for instance in the last round of page proofs, the journal may reasonably demand that you limit your changes to the strictly necessary. That's fine; but make sure that even then you reread the piece and find all those strictly necessary changes—it's amazing how many errors can persist undiscovered until the last moment, or be added in the editing process. I know this from personal experience, since one of my published articles contains a footnote that refers to the “freedom of speach.”
6. Keep the copyright, but grant nonexclusive rights
Your goal as an author is to have your piece be as widely read as possible. This means that:
a. You want to be able to put it on your Web site,