This weekend, I spent about 7 hours checking footnotes on three pages of an article that will be published in one of the school law journals. This is called "subciting", but should be renamed "a miserable way to waste a Sunday."
First, I found the works that had been referred to in the footnotes. Then I tried to figure out if the facts being footnoted were correct. This took .5 hours. The other 6.5 hours was spent ensuring that the footnotes were in the correct format according to the Blue Book. I had only 20 footnotes to check, but there were three problems: (1) the Bluebook has 400 pages (2) all of my sources were in a foreign language, and (3) I had no idea what I was doing.
On the bright side, we get a free coffee mug from the dean tomorrow. Also, on the actual bright side, it seems that my former housemates, including SB, are coming to town on Friday. Sweet!
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6 comments:
So, were any of the footnotes incorrect?
Oh yes. All of them were wrong.
Oh my! This does not give me high hopes for my own book pulling/cite checking assignment to be completed in the next week or so...we, though, do the actual cite checking in a group, slave-labor style.
I also hate the BlueBook. Can you Ivy kids band together and write a new one that just says "C'mon, now, copy and past from WestLaw and it's allllll good yo."
That would be a good BlueBook.
Hey,
I'm a recently admitted HLS student (I guess that would make me a 0L?) and wanted to know how exactly journals work at HLS. Can you join all journals except for HLR during your 1L year? What is the membership process like (write-on, open, etc.)? How many hours a week do you spend working on journals?
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