I highly recommend Sonia Fulop. She did a great job with Transformations in America Legal History.
All of this talk of copy editing reminds me of what seems to be an emerging trend — faculty hiring copy-editors to process work before it goes to a university press. We need to talk about this at some point.
Is it unheard of for Professors to use copy editors to edit law review articles prior to sending them to journals? Just curious.
I've never heard of that, though sometimes faculty will use research assistants to bluebook an article. What seems to be growing in popularity is authors hiring their own copy editors to work on a book manuscript before they send it to their publisher.
While in law school, I edited both law review articles and book manuscripts for authors who were ready to send them out for publication. Most of my clients were non-US professors who did not speak English as a first language but who chose to publish in English. I never called what I did "copy editing," because a substantial portion of what I did, on top of the basic copy editing, was to provide substantive feedback on things like organization of argument or use of sources for people who may not have been familiar with US-style conventions on these sorts of things.
I fell into the job sort of accidentally after working as a research assistant to a visiting professor from another country who was very happy with my work and, when he returned to his home institution, passed my name around to his colleagues.
I don't know that I would recommend everyone use a copy editor before sending things out to publishers (or journals), but I do think it can be a tremendous value-added for people whose ideas are better than the presentation thereof. As we all know, submissions decisions at law reviews, and to some extent at publishing houses as well, can unfairly privilege form over substance, and authors who, for whatever reason, struggle with presenting their work in a form that "looks like" a good article can benefit a lot from getting help.
How about recommendations of indexers? (Sonia Fulop doesn't list indexing as one of the things she does.) One thing I recommend is that if your press suggests that you use an in-house indexer (and then they charge the fee against your royalties)…run in the other direction. I had very good experiences when I hired an independent indexer for both Cold War Civil Rights and my collection, September 11 in History. But when I used an in-house indexer for Exporting American Dreams, it was a complete nightmare, with many obvious errors and omissions. I had to check every single reference and redo the entire index, even though of course they're still charging me for it. Never again.
Yeah, Mary–that's a great question about indexing. Sonia prepared the first draft of the index to Transformations, as I recall.
The one time I prepared an index myself, I actually learned a lot about my manuscript. I'm not sure it's a great use of time, but I found it strangely (or unexpectedly) therapeutic. This reminds me that the next time I finish a book manuscript I want to prepare an index before sending it off for editing, because I think I'll see connections across the chapters.
I greatly appreciate good indexes and had the pleasure of making one, even, if I do say so myself. I paid my bills one summer in grad school by preparing the index for the Cambridge Companion to Rawls. Luckily for me it was on a topic I was interested in so going through the text carefully and slowly (as a good index requires) wasn't tedious.
I suggest searching for an indexer by using the directory of the American Society for Indexing (ASI): http://www.resourcenter.net/Scripts/4Disapi7.dll/4DCGI/resctr/search.html
One indexer in particular whom I highly recommend is Linda Herr Hallinger, of Herr's Indexing Service: http://www.herrsindexing.com/
However, her ASI listing doesn't mention law, so I don't know whether she would be willing to index law materials. Here is her ASI listing: http://tinyurl.com/ybnd3c3
P.S. Although I am a copyeditor, I don't edit law materials; I am a medical copyeditor. However, this page has links to several directories where you can search for copyeditors who do edit manuscripts on law topics:
http://www.kokedit.com/library_CE6.shtml
There are also links there to job-posting pages where you can upload information about the editing services you're searching for.
Need a full-time freelance copyeditor/indexer/proofreader? boblandedits.blogspot.com. 30 years publishing experience. Will provide references from university presses: Yale, Georgia, Tennessee, Baylor, Texas Tech; scholarly/academic presses: Westminster John Knox, Orbis, Templeton, Wipf and Stock, Crossroad; also work directly with authors.