I've blogged before about how Sullivan's Constitutional Law textbook is poorly-edited. After 80 pages of reading today, I'd just like to repeat that if, as a 1L, you somehow end up with a choice of professors, avoid like the plague any class that requires you to use this text. We'll leave aside that fact that punctuation and spelling seem to have been left aside as a non-issue. (The count today? Two sentences without verbs, one of which was almost certainly meant to be a question.) The book has several highly annoying features:

1: Entire paragraphs that are nothing but questions. This is common to law textbooks (what is it about law that makes de rigueur rhetorical questions to which no answer is ever attempted?), but this text will fill a quarter of a page with them. If those questions were then answered, in order, in the paragraphs ahead, it might make sense. This is not always the case.

2: The lack of any structure whatsoever. Some cases are in bold and used as 'main selections.' These may be in sections of their own, but sometimes they're cases that answer a single subheading of a section. Notably, these cases will be listed in a larger, darker font than either the heading or subheading that precedes them. No introduction exists to explain what is considered more important, or to give guidance as to how the book is to be used.

Furthermore, there's no apparent rhyme or reason to which cases are in the notes and which are 'main' cases. Length is no indicator--there's 'notes' cases with excerpts that go on for over four pages. The only difference seems to be that the editing of 'notes' cases is more strict, which means dozens of ellipses and brackets.

Finally, if the cases in a section are in coherent order, I've not discovered it. References to cases fifty pages backward, or worse, forward in the text are given, sometimes without reference. The editing of the references is similarly abysmal. Today's reading included one reference that was off by two-hundred pages, and another off by five.

We're about a fifth of the way through the book. I'm considering just reading the whole thing cover to cover in a few weekends, so as never to have to touch it again.

(If you blog and have suffered through this monstrosity, I encourage you to link to this text with the words "sullivan constitutional law textbook" in the text: if we're lucky, the magic of Google would put criticism before the eyes of the editors.)