Wednesday, November 24, 2004
All rights reserved
Hoist on my own petard©?
As an egotisitcal human being, I crave attention and occasional reaffirmation of my own importance. Professionally, this maps onto my desire to be cited. I publish articles in law reviews from time to time. These are low-circulation, student-edited periodicals sponsored by law schools and read by lawyers, judges, law students and other law professors. Not read by many, I might add.
The fervent wish of any law professor is to have his or her article read, or even better, cited. What ecstasy to see one's name, and the article title one sweated over, named in someone else's law review article -- right there, in 8-point type, in footnote 148! It is the raison d'etre of my chief academic function.
We academics are a bit touchy, however, about having our "works in progress" cited. A draft of an article that is circulated informally or presented at a workshop or conference may bear the following copyright notice:
My manuscript went through several rounds of editing with the law student-editors of J. Law & Inat. Det. , the final two rounds of which were devoted to changing "which" to "that," and changing RR. to Ry. to denote "railroad" in a case cited at footnote 127. After weeks of this, we exhausted our ability to find more nits to pick, and decided the manuscript was letter perfect and ready for publication.
A few weeks later, I received my "reprints." This are attractively bound excerpts of the law review containing my article that I can mail to 100 of my closest friends. Seeing one's own words in nicely-typeset booklet form always makes one feel very ... intelligent.
I open to page one and find the following:
As an egotisitcal human being, I crave attention and occasional reaffirmation of my own importance. Professionally, this maps onto my desire to be cited. I publish articles in law reviews from time to time. These are low-circulation, student-edited periodicals sponsored by law schools and read by lawyers, judges, law students and other law professors. Not read by many, I might add.
The fervent wish of any law professor is to have his or her article read, or even better, cited. What ecstasy to see one's name, and the article title one sweated over, named in someone else's law review article -- right there, in 8-point type, in footnote 148! It is the raison d'etre of my chief academic function.
We academics are a bit touchy, however, about having our "works in progress" cited. A draft of an article that is circulated informally or presented at a workshop or conference may bear the following copyright notice:
Copyright © 2004 by Oscar Madison. All rights reserved. Not to be copied, distributed or cited without the author's express written permission.For reasons I can't explain, I adopted this form myself. Why? What do I care if someone wants to quote my unpublished manuscript? I guess it started when I was a rookie, and I saw that my more experienced colleagues did it. So I started doing it too. Naturally, this copyright notice appeared on the title page of a manuscript I sent to a certain law journal -- let's call it The Journal of Law and Inattention to Detail .
My manuscript went through several rounds of editing with the law student-editors of J. Law & Inat. Det. , the final two rounds of which were devoted to changing "which" to "that," and changing RR. to Ry. to denote "railroad" in a case cited at footnote 127. After weeks of this, we exhausted our ability to find more nits to pick, and decided the manuscript was letter perfect and ready for publication.
A few weeks later, I received my "reprints." This are attractively bound excerpts of the law review containing my article that I can mail to 100 of my closest friends. Seeing one's own words in nicely-typeset booklet form always makes one feel very ... intelligent.
I open to page one and find the following:
Copyright © 2004 by Oscar Madison. All rights reserved. Not to be copied, distributed or cited without the author's express written permission.Oh well.
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