In this entry, I discover the fate of an article I loved.

The very first submission I read when I joined my journal last year was one of the best I read all year. It was well-written, the author had excellent credentials as an expert in the field, and best of all, it presented a real conflict: how to reconcile the demands of a recent Supreme Court decision -- one with which I agreed completely -- with the needs of victim group predominately consisting of the particularly vulnerable?

At the next meeting to discuss submissions, my hand shot up and I argued passionately in favor of the article. Passionately, and quite unnecessarily, as everyone else who had read it agreed that it was of high quality and well worth our publication. It was unanimously accepted for publication, and then we moved on to other business and I forgot about it, except to include the SCOTUS decision in a song for the Law Revue show.

I hadn't realized that the author chose to publish the article elsewhere until I ran across another article by him in which he cited the previous piece as having appeared in the Virginia Law Review. While Virginia is my second-favorite law school after my own -- having not only my undergraduate loyalty but also having been a hospitable environment during this past summer -- I felt a bit affronted by the author's having rejected my journal. How lovingly we would have checked his citations and scrutinized his punctuation for impermissible italicization! while at VLR, he doubtlessly was just another face in the crowd of their much more hectic production schedule.