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Law Review: When Your Existence Just Isn't Pointless EnoughJun 28 '01 Write an essay on this topic.The Bottom Line Should you bother to be on Law Review? Four out of five wingnuts say, "hellsyeah!" "Order of the Coif" sounds funny, to me. For law students, it means that you graduated in the top 10%, which is kind of a big deal. But mainly, the word "Coif" is pronounced to sound a lot like "Queef", which means something entirely different. But I shouldn't really talk about that, because I like that they let me continue writing on this site. Not so funny is the term "Law Review." Yeah, sure, it's every bit as prestigious as being Order of the Queef But unlike that honor, nobody ever stops to think, "SHOULD I want this?" Getting On Depending on what school you go to, getting onto law review requires one or a combination of three things. You can grade on. You can write on. Or you can sign up. Grading on is pretty much what it sounds like. Some law reviews automatically invite the top 10% or the top 15-20 people per grade or the top 3 to 5 people per class, based purely on academic standing. Writing on is also pretty much what it sounds like. At my law school, everyone who wanted to be on one of 4 of the 5 law reviews picked up a packet of cases and a hypothetical on the last day of first year finals. We were asked to write an appellate opinion based on those materials and to submit them exactly a week later to each of the law reviews. Based on those writing samples, the reviews would choose whether or not to extend an invitation to you sometime at the end of the summer. Signing on is, well, also exactly what it sounds like. The journal lets you be on staff if you come over and say, "Hey, can I be on your journal." What is it and What Do They Do Like almost all vocations, lawyers have professional periodicals that allow them to keep abreast of developments in their field. Unlike most vocations, lawyers have thousands of them. The vast majority of them are published by law schools. Some are published by divisions of various state bars or independent publishers. The most prestigious of them are typically named simply after the law school from which they originate: Harvard Law Review, Hastings Law Journal, Case Western Reserve Law Review. Many law schools also have "secondary journals" that publish only on specific topics: International Law, Labor Law; Entertainment Law, etc. Nearly all law reviews publish four issues per year. Those issues contain something called "articles" (genius, right?) which are lengthy analyses of cutting edge topics in developing law and the like, typically written by law professors and, sometimes, practitioners. There are usually about a dozen of these. But each issue also typically contains two or three "notes" which are the same thing as articles, except they are frequently longer and better written, and they are written by law students. Specifically, law students on that journal. Law professors who publish articles get to keep their jobs. Law students who publish notes get to say, "Hey, I got my note published" for about a week, then nobody cares. No pay is involved for anyone. What are you and What do You do As a second year law student on a law review, you are called a "member" (again, genius, right?). And it's a pretty apt name because you're likely to be a big dick for a while once you get on. When you realize what the job requires, you are likely to become permaflacid. As a member, you are a slave. It is your job to edit and "blue book" articles written by professors. Editing means reading the professor's article to make sure that it makes sense – that it contains no grammatical or punctuation errors, that it reads well, and that it's organized logically. Except you will likely share this duty with two or three other members, because the editors want some redundancy built into the system. Redundancy is the internal check by which Law Review editors make sure you're not just saying you're reading an article when you're really just having late night sex with your girlfriend in the editor's office. Since you rarely know which other members are assigned to read the same selection you're assigned, you can't be certain whether they're slacking, as you'd like to, or actually reading the thing. If they are reading it, and they find too many mistakes that you don't find, the editors get angry and start looking for used condoms in their office trash can. If you're already in law school, you know what "Blue booking" is. Same process for Law Review articles as for your memos. Skip the next paragraph. If you're not in law school, here goes: The Blue Book is for lawyers what Strunk & White's The Elements of Style is to undergraduate English majors, and The New York Times style manual is to journalists. It's an exhaustive list of rules relating to how you have to support your statements – how you have to cite things. For instance, if someone writes "Federal courts regard a woman's right to privacy differently depending on which trimester of pregnancy she is in," they have to follow that statement with a location somewhere in the world that supports it. Typically, it will be a citation to the appellate case that the proposition came from. In this instance, you'd write "Roe v. Wade, 38 U.S. 759 (1972). Except that you wouldn't write that, because the Blue Book requires you to precede anything that's not a direct quote with "See" and you have to make sure to either underline it or italicize it. So you'd write, See, Roe v. Wade 38 U.S. 759 (1972). Except, since there are a lot of cases now that stand for that proposition, you wouldn't write it that way either, because, Roe v. Wade is only one of many cases you could cite. Instead, you have to write, See, e.g., Roe v. Wade 38 U.S. 759 (1972). Except that's not really right either, because Roe v. Wade is a long case that stands for a lot of propositions, so properly, you should "pin cite" the page upon which the proposition is spelled out: See, e.g., Roe v. Wade, 38 U.S. 759, 771 (1972). And by the way, make sure not to italicize the commas, dammit, even though I just did there. That's important. And if you're gonna cite a state case for the same proposition, make sure to put the date before the volume number and directly after the party names instead of after the page number before the period. And for god's sake, don't forget there are two spaces both before and after the party names and either the date or the page number, unless it's part of a string cite, in which case you put no spaces between the page number and the semi-colon, but one space after the semi-colon and before the next set of party names, unless it's an international case, in which case the rules are different. And in any case if you cited Roe v. Wade the way I did above, you'd be wrong, because I made up the cite numbers. WAKE UP! If that last paragraph bored you to tears, imagine what it would be like to spend 15 hours a week reading that paragraph. Welcome to being a member of law review. Editor: The Capo di tuti Cazzo Now imagine spending 40 hours a week reading that paragraph, plus making sure everyone else is reading that paragraph, and that they're not cheating and just skimming through that paragraph. Can you imagine it? Good. Congratulations, you're an editor on law review. Soon enough, you'll be out of law school and you'll be a lawyer. When that happens, you'll realize that some of the work you do is "drunk work." You may have to summarize a deposition, which takes like 14 hours if it was a six hour deposition. Or you may have to review a banker's box of documents for privileged materials, which takes about 4 hours. It's mindless work that you could probably do in your sleep, but instead you'll do it after you've been out drinking with your friends after your normal 12 hour regular-lawyering work day. And you'll do it fine. But you'll do it drunk. Well all that stuff in the first section back there about blue-booking? That's all drunk work. But it's done by non-lawyers who don't quite have it down yet, so even though there is redundancy built into the system, all three or four members will miss a few mistakes. And when you're an editor, you've got to catch those mistakes, which means it's not drunk work for you. You can let nothing slip by. Why is that? Because this is your law review man, and you've got to put out perfect product. And why is that? I don't know. Almost nobody will ever read the damn thing once it's published, but you're supposed to take pride in it or something. Perfection is suddenly important. Maybe it's just that it's the last chance you'll ever have in the law to actually do something completely, perfectly and not at the last minute. But it seems to be important. So those 40 hours you'll spend a week, reading tomes with a fine tooth comb and scanning the room for condom wrappers, on top of your usual class-work and the part time law office job you may be holding down, is incredibly intense and focused. You are apt to become humorless. You are likely to develop that thousand-yard stare typically associated with guys just back from the ‘Nam. You will lose hair, get fat and smell bad. Well, that's what I tell everyone, ‘cause I didn't make editor. But as far as you know, it's true.  |
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