"It has to help an author to know that an army of editors has gone out and checked every statement in their piece for veracity," Szpak adds.
The process is slow and tedious, and this year the Review has fallen two months behind schedule--it just finished its January issue Nevertheless, it is still several steps ahead of the rival New Haven publication, from courtrooms and law offices around the nation, last years's Yale Law Journal executives are now struggling to complete the final four issues of their 1982 83 volume.
Nelson says that the Review's recent slippage occurred because "a large number of people at a crucial period of time were just not putting out the effort that they should have."
The demands on Review members' time can be overwhelming. Typically, editors spend most of their free time at the Review, sitting behind the keyboards of word-processing terminals or in the Review's legal library.
"The rule of thumb for second year students is that you spend 30 to 40 hours working at the Law Review; there's just no way you can do that and read all your cases and go to all your classes unless you're superhuman," says Jones.
Editors say they're forced to cram for exams and resort to prepared course outlines, but few complain that their grades suffer significantly. Many comment that skills they develop at the Review improve their academic performance.
Some Review editors are married with family lives, but for many, the intense atmosphere of Gannett House becomes a social focus as well. "As a social institution, it's not ideal," says Nelson. "Many people would be happier if they did more of their socializing elsewhere simply because things do get tangled up in people's feelings of intellectual self worth."
"People's egos tend to be at stake and that can place strains on relationships here," he adds.
Tensions also result from the two-track selection system, editors say. The grades route is considered more prestigious, and editors who join the Review later through the writing competition are sometimes accorded less respect, Hoffman says.
"Given the time difference and the weight that people tend to attribute to grades, there are in certain cases feelings of superiority or inferiority that manifest themselves in people's relationships," Nelson says.
Hoffman adds that the new selection process, which requires all candidates to participate in the writing competition, should erase those distinctions.
Additional strains can arise as members jostle for masthead positions. Fight editors vied for the presidency in the Review's recent election, which Nelson says was more divisive than the previous contest.
Fram, who emerged the victor, had the weighty responsibility of naming the rest of the masthead. After deliberating for a week, he filled the top executive spots with his former adversaries.
A self-described "liberal Democrat." Fram dropped out of Princeton University and worked in a sheet metal factory for two years before returning to earn his undergraduate degree. After graduating, he went to work for a dissident faction of the Teamsters union.
Fram now spends most of his waking hours behind the executive desk in the Review president's office, beneath stately portraits of Louis D. Brandies, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Class of 1861. Felix Frankfurter, and other eminent jurists.
Reflecting on the prestige and rewards of the Review, he remarks. "It's definitely a big plus and everyone knows that." But, he adds. "I just can't see it as the be-all and end-all."
"It seems almost ludicrous in the abstract to think that a 2 L should be telling a tenured professor at one of the nation's most prestigious law schools how he should change his piece, but in fact a lot of these pieces need work."
Outgoing Articles Director Mark P. Szpak