The hell that is subciting

Subciting is a process that first year law students know well because they constitute the main slave labor force recruited by law journals to do this thankless task. Well, I shouldn’t say thankless – my editors did say thank you yesterday. But thanks is very poor recompense for the hours of precise fact checking and even more precise correction of proper citation format – hours that I will never get back and that I rue to the extreme.

And yet – this is my second time around on the subcite hellwheel – I did several pages for a prestigious journal on civil rights last month, which, incidentally, was the week before my first big freak out session. Just sayin’.

What subciting entails is this: you get several pages of a law journal article that is goingn to get published. You check to see that the text is properly attributed (often there are sentences that should be and aren’t), that the attributed stuff is actually in the place that the author says it is (if it is, great; if it isn’t, you start hunting throughout the doc), that the attributed stuff accurately reflects what’s in the source (sometimes requiring you to read entire cases), and that the citation is in the right format (harder than it sounds because the rules for formatting are so precise and often the sources you’re dealing with are not in your handy guide to formatting).

Bottom line: it sucks.

Why am I doing this again? Well, I dropped one of my other activities, so I felt like I had to do this one, and besides, it’s a concrete task that’s over in a defined period, and who knows, maybe there are some nice people on the journal, yadda yadda blippity boppity boo. So it is my own damn fault and believe me, I am putting myself in the doghouse for a long time for this. I can’t believe I’m doing this again.

What makes me really angry is that the authors for these law journal articles are so sloppy about their scholarship. In the article I’m fact checking and editing right now, there are three pages of stuff that isn’t in the source the author cites to. Just isn’t there. In one sentence on another page, the author writes about something that happened in last year and cites it to a source that came out in 2000.

And it’s not just the citing. A hallmate said that his article was full of paragraphs that, but for a few transposed phrases here and there, was lifted practically verbatim from the source. The same shit is going on in my article too. That stuff needs to be in quotes; you can’t pass off something as your own thought and just drop a casual footnote to make up for it. What’s the point, then? Why not just tell your readers to read the source you’re cribbing from? Scholarship is supposed to add something new to the debate, so why bother copying chunks of facts from someplace else?

Sloppy, sloppy. And the system allows it. It encourages it – why bother checking your footnotes if you know some 22-year-old law student is going to do it for free, and with a grin too, because if you want to get on a law journal, you have to subcite for that journal as a 1L. And everyone is on a journal.

I actually was not going to do this subciting crap, and I know at least one person who actually didn’t do it. Why did I get sucked in? Someone said to me: “You HAVE to do a journal.” And I thought, “Well, I should just do it and see how it is.” That was the first time. This time, I have no excuse. I’m just a glutton for punishment. I hate me.