J.D. Vance Described As 'Editor Of The Yale Law Journal'... Which Seems A Tad Misleading
Law school graduates understand how journals work, but most people will be duped.
JD Vance (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Republicans are still getting to know their new VP nominee. Having served less than two years in the Senate, Vance had to grow a beard just so he wouldn’t be carded by the Senate bartenders. Some Republicans like what they see in the new convert to the Make America Great Again cause, having traded his 2016 sense that “Trump is America’s Hitler” for the 2024 rallying cry “Trump is America’s Hitler!”
So to introduce their candidate to the masses, the Trump campaign put out a short bio when announcing the pick, writing that Vance “is a Yale Law School Graduate, where he was Editor of The Yale Law Journal and President of the Yale Law Veterans Association.”
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Me Tarzan, you Editor.
Pro writing tip: sometimes the lack of an article can be a red flag. From the NY Times:
Mr. Vance won a spot on the staff of The Yale Law Journal — a prestigious position that is often a steppingstone to a coveted appellate court clerkship — but not as one of its top editors. He instead worked with a group of editors whose primary job was to check citations.
See, they couldn’t say “the” editor and didn’t want to admit to him being “an” editor so they just awkwardly left it out entirely.
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To the general audience, this implies that Vance rose to become the journal’s boss. Law school graduates, on the other hand, will recognize that the lack of any qualifier on that title means Vance toiled as one of the 60 or so run-of-the-mill grunt editors chasing down a copy of a book that only exists in an offsite cold storage facility buried with the Ark of the Covenant.
Not that joining the journal isn’t an achievement in itself. But when the campaign needed to describe Vance’s work it eschewed “an editor” or “served on” in favor of “he was Editor of The Yale Law Journal.”
Frankly, that’s the sort of sloppy writing I’d expect a law journal editor to catch in first pass.
How Yale Propelled J.D. Vance’s Career [NY Times]
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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
