Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Query of the Day

Are there any words more chilling to a law review staffer than "find me where it says this in the Clean Water Act"?

On second thought, don't answer that.

2 comments:

PG said...

Yes. Where they ask you to find something in a document that isn't online and text-searchable.

Perhaps the new generation of law review folks has figured this stuff out, but I struck my editors as a bloody genius because I knew how to do things like search Amazon for terms to verify that a quote really did appear in a book that we didn't happen to have in our library. I figure this appearance of my being technologically advanced will be good for about another two years. It's holding up at work thus far, but only because they're mostly older people.

David Schraub said...

Well, it isn't that simple -- if it were just "find me this quote", then a text-search is easy. If it is "find me something in the CWA that exhibits the author's views on feasibility analysis," that's less useful.