Responding to a Scheherazade post, Evan Schaeffer offers this defense of the law review experience:
Once you got over the initial cite-checking hurdle, all of the third year editorial staff, from the editor-in-chief on down, learned skills like these: how to manage large projects to completion, how to take a small budget and use it to accomplish large things, how to manage a distracted staff, each working on a little piece of a giant puzzle. These lessons were in addition to all the good that came from learning about editing and fact-checking (skills often learned the hard way, since even some of the best stuff we accepted for publication had to be substantially rewritten. The authors of the articles, by the way, gladly accepted this "student editing").I was nodding in agreement until I hit the parenthetical. Early in my career, I had law review editors try rewriting my articles. They never improved the article; to the contrary, they often introduced serious errors of substance or grammar. The higher the law review was ranked, the more serious the problem seemed to be. Once I got tenure, and getting published in a hurry was no longer at issue, I began putting a clause in the publication agreement giving me the right to pull the article from the journal if I disagreed with the editors. I've never had to use it, but I have had to threaten doing it a couple of times. As a result, if you compare my draft articles at ssrn to the finished product, you'll see very few changes.
