Last-minute advice for bar exam takers.

On one of our other blogs (here).

One of many reasons that I like Mark Yudof.

Here.

Dear Mr. Whelan of the National Review:

Wow.  Our faculty letter and our Dean's letter must have really struck a nerve with you.  (See also here and here.)

Before I respond to you, here's some background on me:  I'm a moderate--not liberal, not conservative.  Moderate.  I married into a military family (husband/father-in-law/brother-in-law are former Marines; sister-in-law was career Air Force; late mother-in-law was Army).  I interviewed for a Rehnquist clerkship.  I'm probably not what you envision when you think about liberal faculty members in law schools. 

I signed the faculty letter because I believe that it's important to remind the profession that we can have meaningful conversations about controversial issues--issues about which good-hearted and smart people can disagree--in a civil manner. Here's what our letter said:

RESPONSE BY MEMBERS OF THE BOYD SCHOOL OF LAW FACULTY AND
STAFF TO ALAN LEFEBVRE’S “MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT”

As members of the faculty and staff of UNLV’s William S. Boyd School of Law, we were dismayed to read the May 2014 Nevada Lawyer column by Alan J. Lefebvre, written in his capacity as President of the State Bar of Nevada. We fear that the tone of Mr. Lefebvre’s undignified column brings disrespect on the Bar and undermines principles of professionalism that we endeavor to instill in our students.

Mr. Lefebvre’s ostensible subject was Nevada’s prohibition on same-sex marriage. He disparaged the conclusion by Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto and endorsed by Governor Brian Sandoval that the ban cannot be defended in federal court. There are reasonable debates to be had about how our state’s officials should respond to a rapidly shifting legal landscape. But such debates require a climate of mutual respect. The mission of the State Bar of Nevada is, in part, to “elevate the standard of honor, integrity, and courtesy in the legal profession” and “to promote a spirit of cordiality” among lawyers. In our roles as faculty and staff at Nevada’s only law school, we want to pass these values on to our graduates. It is thus regrettable that Mr. Lefebvre’s essay consists largely of insults, ad hominem attacks, sarcasm, and sectarian references that are simply inappropriate for the leader of an important institution in a vibrant and diverse state.

We recognize that issues like marriage equality naturally inspire passionate responses. But in the legal profession passion must be expressed with dignity and thoughtful analysis. Mr. Lefebvre’s column was lacking in the civility that should guide the behavior of every Nevada attorney. It is a serious disappointment for such indignity to emanate from the leader of the state bar.

What we were trying to convey in the letter is that it is perfectly legitimate to express disagreement--passionately but still politely--with our attorney general's position, but that we wanted to keep the discourse civil.  Our dean's letter, too, was respectful in its approach.  Your column?  Not so much, frankly, with its sneer about us being a "fourth-tier school" (not true, and also not very nice of you).

I'm not a "delicate flower," as your column suggests.  I'm happy to engage with you on this issue, publicly or privately.  Maybe we could come away from a conversation with a better appreciation of each other's point of view.

Oh, and your reference to "one well-informed source [who conveyed to you that]: 'Even by the standards of the modern American law school, the Boyd School of Law’s faculty is remarkably intolerant of dissent. Opponents to the Orthodoxy are either evil or ignorant, take your pick'"?  That's not been my experience.  I've found my colleagues to be exceptionally civil in their discourse, even when they disagree with each other (and including when they disagree with me).  So we have your anonymous person who blasted our school, and we have me, with a completely different take on Boyd's atmosphere.  That's an n of two, which is too small a sample size for an outsider to form an opinion. 

Let's see if you and I can engage in a sincere conversation that rests on a basic assumption:  you've thought long and hard about your views, and you have good reasons for holding them, and I've thought long and hard about mine, and I have good reasons for holding them, too.  Maybe a conversation might give each of us more fodder for thought.

An update for editors everywhere.

From my buddy Kathleen Lyon, some thoughts about editing (here) in response to my frustrated screed (here). 

Dear law review editors everywhere--a few words of advice.

I'm in the process of reading page proofs from two different journals, both involving symposia, and I want to explain why one journal did a superb job of editing my work and one didn't.  If you're a law review editor who follows this advice, you're likely to have very happy authors.  If you don't, you might end up being the focus of comments like this one.

1. Respect the author's voice.  You're not the author.  The person whose article you accepted is the author, and every author has his or her own style of writing.  Don't futz with that style.  It's one thing to tell an author that something that she wrote is unclear, or that a transition doesn't make sense, or that you see a hole in her argument.  Those are wonderful things to do, and telling an author those things makes the article stronger.  Deciding to "fix" the way that the author writes because you don't like her style is not a wonderful thing to do.  (We're just going to change back all of your "fixes" anyway, so both of us will end up feeling frustrated.)
2. If you do make changes, make sure that the changes are obvious when you return the revisions to the author.  It's annoying to see an article that's been revised so many times by various editors that the "track changes" feature has become worthless.  The failure to indicate what language was changed from the author's original language just delays your editorial process because it slows down the author's review of your edits.  Oh, and mere formatting changes?  Those are different--go ahead and "accept" those changes so that we don't have to spend time doing that ourselves.*  I doubt that any of us care how you format your footnotes or what font you use, as long as the substance of the article is correct.
3. If you make changes, get them right.  Please don't "fix" the author's writing by inserting language that changes the author's meaning, or by mis-citing things, or by making mistakes in spelling or grammar.  Although it's possible that you write more clearly than does your author,  it's not probable.  We write for a living; you're learning how to write as lawyers.  The odds are in our favor that we were right the first time.
4. Be timely.  If you need a revision turned around by a specific date, work backwards from that date and give the author plenty of time to look at your proposed changes--and make sure that the author has actually received your revisions.  If you don't hear from an author by, say, a week after you've sent out a draft, follow up.  Email glitches can happen.
5. Be accurate.  Don't make mistakes in cite-checking.  One of the best things that law reviews do is train students to be anal-retentive about certain things.  We want you to obsess over whether cross-references match.  We want you to be disturbed when a quotation mark is missing or a parenthetical statement has an open parenthesis but not a closed one.  We want you to check to see if every footnote is internally consistent.  We want you to be master proofreaders.  Talent at obsessing over tiny details will serve you well as a lawyer.  If, though, you miss obvious things, or if you alter things that actually were correct, we lose confidence in your abilities.
6. Help the author "plug" the final version.  Some law reviews tweet about their issues; some go so far as to send copies to other professors whose work figured prominently in the article itself.  These creative ideas go a long way toward making an author so happy with your work that he or she looks forward to placing another article with your law review.

When the collaborative process between an author and her editors results in a better article than the one that the author had originally drafted, everyone wins. 

____________________
* Better yet:  give us two versions.  One should be the "track changes" version with the formatting changes already accepted, and one should be the version that shows every single thing that you changed from the author's own draft.

It's not just anonymity that provides a cover for cowardice.

I thought that yesterday's WSJ piece, Why We Are So Rude Online, was particularly apt.  It's easy to treat online communications as something other than "real" writing, but what we put online (and in texts and emails) is just as real to those reading it as something that's hard-bound and on a shelf.  That's why we--especially those of us who are law-trained--need to be very careful about what we commit to paper, even if the "paper" is just a bunch of pixels.

Dear RNC and DNC:

STOP IT.  Stop calling us at home.  We mean it.  It does you no good to call us, because there is literally nothing that you will say in your phone calls that will influence us, and all that you're doing is ticking us off by disturbing us at home.

This morning, the DNC called:

DNC:  Hi, is this Nancy?
Me:  Yes.
DNC:  We're from the DNC, and we're calling you to . . .
Me.:  Here's the thing:  we're sick of these phone calls, and so we've made a rule that whichever party calls us last is the party against whom we're voting.
DNC:  Oh, you're so full of it.
Me:  [click]

Dear DNC:  Your person was rude by calling me "full of it," so you're now at "vote -1."  PLEASE DO NOT CALL ME TO APOLOGIZE.  It's OK, though, if you find out who spoke with me this morning and reprimand her.