Joining a Journal
Yesterday I attended the first meeting of the year for my student journal, the Harvard Law and Policy Review (HLPR.) I ate way too much pizza, made a few friends, and caught up with some old ones, including a 1L I know from high school and was really excited to see had joined.
I think journals can be a great source of friendship and camaraderie, because—let’s face it—it can be pretty dry at times, and surviving that can really bring people together. But obviously a lot of people do enjoy it, because Harvard has 16 journals whose leadership is full of 2Ls and 3Ls who have stayed involved semester after semester. I myself accepted two promotions at the end of last year, and to help you understand them I’ll say a little about how journals work.
Every journal is unique, especially HLPR because at four years old it’s a very young organization still working out its structure and niche. So it’s hard to generalize, but with us, 1L students contribute by joining article teams headed by an Article Editor (usually a 2L) and supervised by a Senior Article Editor (usually a 2L or 3L.) The teams do two rounds of work on an article: a substantive edit for things like thesis and organization, and a technical edit or “subcite” to correct punctuation errors, typos, and citations to sources (including page numbers, formatting, and characterization of the source.) The subcite is one thing pretty much every 1L on every journal will experience, but their substantive involvement varies; I think ours is on the high end. Loads of other things go into the production of a journal, like solicitations, policy, and (at HLPR at least) even more proofreading by a couple of tech teams headed by Senior Tech Editors and supervised by the journal’s Executive Technical Editor. A lot of this goes on without the knowledge of 1Ls, but none of it could happen without them.
So anyway, I’ll be serving as an Article Editor and a Senior Tech Editor this year, and I’m pretty likely to be overwhelmed but very excited about contributing to a real publication read by professionals all over the country. (If you visit my journal’s website, you’ll see a picture of Senator Patrick Leahy waving a copy of the issue I edited as a 1L.) My article team is gathering for our substantive edit meeting Sunday, and I hope to pass this same enthusiasm on to them.
- Lea
