Tuesday, October 05, 2004

Re. Re: ...The Ogletree Transgression

This blog recently received an email from a lawyer who made very valuable comments but does not want to be identified. The lawyer has, however, given permission for the email to be reproduced with all identifying information redacted. The redacted version appears below:
‘[T]he real scandal of legal academia is that law review editors do so . . . much work on many articles, including ones by prominent professors, in some cases enough to deserve co-author credit or at least significant mention in the first footnote. I surmise that the problem is especially true at "speciality" journals, . . . which tend to take weaker articles in the first place. >From my experience as editor-in-chief of [a law review], I know that a number of professors whom we published went on to bigger and better jobs and gained reputations on the basis of articles that were barely publishable when we accepted them and became decent only b/c of the work our staff put into them. Why did we accept them then? Well, we existed and we had to publish something. Imagine the stuff we rejected.