JOSH BLACKMAN: Professor Xiao Wang in the Minnesota Law Review Refutes A Position I Do Not Hold.

Wang should have cited my National Review piece as support for this thesis! We agree!

Here, we have a failure of the author to accurately cite a source, and the failure of the editors to check sources. Moreover, it is all too common for authors to tease student editors with lofty claims like “I challenge conventional wisdom” or “I proved so-and-so-wrong.” The latter claim is especially attractive when the author shows that conservatives are worse than liberals, or even worse, a conservative author is a hypocrite. (That’s me.). The journal was snookered here.

I emailed both Wang and the journal. They replied there would be no correction. So this blog post will serve as the rejoinder.

May I offer some advice to editors: if you ever say someone is wrong, actually quote them. Don’t paraphrase them. Don’t take a few words out of context. Quote them at length. Quote the exact point that you are saying was wrong. And once you’ve done that, stop short of actually saying they’re wrong. Make it soft. The author may have erred when he wrote… The author failed to consider… The author did not account for… And so on. But don’t write that your work “contradicts” what someone else wrote–especially when the person you are criticizing supports your work.

This seems like the scholarly approach.