what's wrong with student law review editors

"Unless the author is a famous one whose prose the editors dare not tamper with, the edited and published writing usually takes on an ‘official’ law-review style that is lacking in personality or individual idiom, overburdened with abstract phraseology, bottom-heavy with footnotes, humorless, and generally unobservant of good grammar and diction. This last fault is perhaps ineradicable, at least in the U.S., inasmuch as legally trained young men and women are called upon to be professional editors when not one in fifty has a background suitable to the task."

- Bryan A. Garner, A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage 507 (2d ed., Oxford U. Press 1995)

hat tip: Professor Wayne Schiess, University of Texas

(spl)