For any of you who don�t know, I�m the managing editor of the Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion. My position is very labor intensive and very rewarding. I get to focus all my anal retentiveness into a project that I get such pleasure from. I�m essentially the second in command and fully responsible for the quality of the published material we put out. I have to organize the work the Journal does, and I do the final edits for form and content before they are published.

We are a scholarly publication equivalent to a peer review publication in a scientific field. The work of editing legal writing is so onerous that virtually all scholarly legal publications are done by students at their various law schools. They tricked us into trying very hard to be selected for a law review, which actually means doing all the crap work they can�t pay others to do, by calling it an �honor.� And so because we all need the edge to get the good jobs we all go �OH MY GOD! I have to get on the law review or I�m gonna be a huge failure!� and then we kill ourselves trying to out do each other in regard to membership. I have recently decided I don�t want to be a lawyer so I do it because I like it. I�m wacked!

Anyway, unless you live under a rock you know that the intersection of law and religion has been very much in the news lately. It seems some religious zealots have crashed some planes and caused a lot of havoc. Then the prez got all mad and screwed up his face and promised to �route �em out and whip �em.� There�s not really a greater nexus between law and religion than a holy war. Well, here�s where it gets interesting.

It seems that last week a very reputable program on NPR reported that the Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion was producing a special edition on Islam. We have no such plans. Although there are some student written pieces that we publish, we do not write the majority of our own stuff. Our content is submitted to us by scholars or practitioners and we review these submissions to select a few we think are of high quality to edit and check and publish. We have no mechanism in place to publish an extra edition on Islam. What�s more we�re a web based journal. We don�t sell subscriptions.

Now imagine advising the technical editors who man our phone and email to instruct NASA that NPR got it wrong. To tell the NSA we can�t sell them a subscription that includes our special edition on Islam because we don�t sell subscriptions and we aren�t going to have a special edition on Islam. Imagine taking those calls. �Please tell the Secretary that we can�t rush him our Special Islam edition because it is not in the pipeline. We have a very interesting piece on the Ecclesiastical Courts in England coming in January��

So I noted that WHYY is having a membership drive. You know, this is where the public broadcasting entity in your community begs for money. I wonder if I�ll call and pledge a sum of my cash. It is a mystery.

Posted at 5:44 p.m.

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