When Law Review Becomes A Living Hell For Law Students
This is one way to really piss off your fellow editors.
Welcome back to Foreseeable Harm, a series where we take a look at some of the most appalling law school horror stories, straight from the law school trenches. These are real emails and messages we’ve received from real readers. Take a look at today’s tale of law school woe:
I was an editor of the Law Review, and happy to have what seemed like a smart, very capable team of fellow editors assigned to my Note. I like the idea of having smart readers; I always have. One of my fellow editors, on the other hand, was of the opinion that editors don’t need editing, and that the idea they do is deeply offensive — at least, that was her explanation for trying to sabotage my work when it was discovered that she’d deleted swathes of text, replaced others with nonsensical commentary, and otherwise made a mess of it. Maybe she didn’t like that I’d written on and she’d graded on, I don’t know — I couldn’t and still don’t understand the mindset that there’s something illegitimate about that, but a good many lawyers act as if there is, the sort of lawyers who are deeply suspicious of anything too subjective for them to feel capable of understanding.
I was able to recover my work from a file stored elsewhere, but the EIC and Managing Editor did nothing more than assign another editor to take her place, and put a password on the file. There were no consequences for her whatsoever, as far as I can tell. Who among us is to say that behaving like a petulant child isn’t okay?
She contacted me through LinkedIn a few years later, not to apologize but to point out we were both then blogging about the same subject. I can’t imagine what sort of response she expected. My angriest anger isn’t directed at her, but at the EIC and Managing Editor, both of whom were either too craven or ambivalent to do anything of substance about the matter. Both are now partners at high-profile NYC firms, where presumably they’re still normalizing the squalid and indefensible way our profession nearly always makes room for people who perform well in law school exams, no matter how troubled they are, no matter how insufferable their behavior, no matter how ruinous their effect on others or on office culture.
If I had a chance to go back to that time, I’d have made more noise about what happened and demand a stronger response, but if I could go back a little further I wouldn’t have gone to law school in the first place. The work is interesting but the people are mostly dreadful and exhausting.
What’s your law school horror story? You know you have one, so feel free to email us (subject line: “Law School Horror Story”) or text us (646-820-8477) and tell us all about it. We may feature some of them here in an upcoming post on Above the Law.
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Staci Zaretsky has been an editor at Above the Law since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.