Nice Guys Finish as EIC

I found out this weekend that my Note for Law Review was not selected for publication in Issue 5 of this year's Minn. L. Rev. That's cool, I didn't expect it to be published, since they were only going to publish nine Notes out of a group of 38 staff members.

Anyway, yesterday I was in the Law Review office finishing up some details of our most recent cite checking assingment when a classmate asked me about the BlackBerry case. While I was talking about it, the Law Review Editor-in-Chief was using the microwave to prepare his lunch and heard me talking about the case and told me that it sounded interesting and, jokingly, that "You should write a note about that."

I responded, also jokingly "Yeah, it would have been better than the Note I did write." Referring to my recent rejection. He chuckled the way people do when you both know you are making a joke that isn't funny, but still feel the need to be polite, and then walked back to his office.

Then, after about a minute, he came back out and said to me "You know, I actually thought your Note was really good, and that it was really close to being published. I wanted to really encourage you to 'fix it up' and resubmit it for publication in Issue 6."

I just thought this was a really nice thing to do. Yes, I didn't expect to be published. Yes, he was probably just blowing smoke. But the thing is, he went out of his way and came back to blow the smoke.

It was a nice little pick-me-up before I had to get back to my already building mountain of reading backlogged.