Law Review EIC Vetting Process Forum

[rpupkin]

You seem like a complete douche. A joke in a footnote of a personal statement? Seems pretty dumb and worse to ask for advice on it. I would work to make sure you were not EIC. Thankfully, I work at a firm where the partner is normal and hires normal associates. I can already tell how annoying of a student you are and worse how annoying you will be as an attorney.

kpr86's law firm must be a lovely place to work.

[Nebby]

I would assume a published note is more valuable than EIC, for clerkship purposes.

[rpupkin]

I would assume a published note is more valuable than EIC, for clerkship purposes.

Nah. EIC of flagship is far more valuable.

[NotMyRealName09]

Though I have a limited anecdotal sample size, the two EIC's on my law review over my two years were both striver d-bags. Nice people, but douches. Of course, they probably thought I was a slacker jerk off, and I would never have socialized with them in my everyday life. My point is everyone is an asshole.

[A. Nony Mouse]

My EIC was awesomely great, on a board of generally cool and chill people. Of course, I am probably a striver douche myself, so it's all relative.

BrooklynLaw16, see if you can get any previous years' examples. I'd imagine the culture varies from school to school. I would not hype your passion for legal academia, personally - your desire for efficiency, to improve the LR, to raise its profile - that kind of thing makes sense, but I don't think passion for legal academia really goes over well.

[arklaw13]

My EIC was awesomely great, on a board of generally cool and chill people. Of course, I am probably a striver douche myself, so it's all relative.

BrooklynLaw16, see if you can get any previous years' examples. I'd imagine the culture varies from school to school. I would not hype your passion for legal academia, personally - your desire for efficiency, to improve the LR, to raise its profile - that kind of thing makes sense, but I don't think passion for legal academia really goes over well.

idk our incoming EIC touted academic aspirations as one of the reasons for wanting EIC. Went over well for him.

[A. Nony Mouse]

This probably goes back to the popularity contest element - If they like you, you can sell whatever you say.

Also, academic aspirations from my school are pretty unrealistic, so it's not a very convincing argument in that context. It probably goes over better at schools that actually place people in academia.

[k5220]

Our current EIC bought an easy bake oven for our journal office before receiving the position. Bribery with awesome nostalgia and baked goods.

[beepboopbeep]

A bunch of stuff:

- If you made it through a year of staffer work and still want to be EIC, then I don't know why anyone here would tell you you shouldn't do it. Not running and screaming at the thought of EIC work is just about enough qualification for the job, imo.

- The EIC for our next board was a surprising pick to me in that, while generally well-liked, she was neither toward the tip-top of the class grades-wise nor a super obvious striver. I am fairly antisocial when it comes to dealing with other lawl students so I don't really know what the cliques / alliances were, but it also didn't seem like she was an incredible social butterfly, either. Her comment was one of the first to be accepted for publication and, I would guess just from knowing her, she probably did really solid work throughout the year as a staffer - if you can go back in time and make sure you do those things, I'd say you've got a decent shot. If you haven't shown competence so far, no amount of personal statement bullshit is going to save you.

- Knowing the people who were going for top board positions in my year: they all seemed to intrinsically give tons of shits about law review work. Law review was something they genuinely enjoyed and would do for as many hours a week as they could spare. Hearing your motivations, it doesn't really sound like this is you. I assure you - people can sniff out whether you're just trying to climb the ladder because you want to be at the top, rather than actually wanting to do the things that come with the position. If you are an exceptional sociopath who's able to convincingly fake enthusiasm for law review itself--not SCOTUS, not 3L OCI, not getting $$$--that's going to help way more than expressing some desire for legal academia or whatever. The people who go around saying "I want to do legal academia!" rather than just quietly going out and writing papers and researching their own topics are the ones that draw the biggest eye rolls.

I am a schlub who went for an easier/lower-time-commitment board position and was never in contention for EIC/ME/whatever--nor did I have any desire to go for it; seriously, EIC sounds like the actual worst thing ever--so take this with as many grains of salt as you want. Just my 2c.

[BigZuck]

Lol law review striverdom horribleness

Don't do it kid

If you're looking for reasons why not, read this thread

Just run dude. And I don't mean run for EIC. I mean run as far away from this awfulness as possible. You don't want to be a Boopbeep, thinking he's above it all and yet still has an opinion on the worthiness of each EIC candidate. You want to not even know who these people are. Because only then can you truly live.

tl:dr: Be alive. Don't even know who your fellow editors are and shirk/hide from work as much as possible.

What's the upside to being EIC for you anyway?

[beepboopbeep]

Just run dude. And I don't mean run for EIC. I mean run as far away from this awfulness as possible. You don't want to be a Boopbeep, thinking he's above it all and yet still has an opinion on the worthiness of each EIC candidate. You want to not even know who these people are. Because only then can you truly live.

While accepting that I do indeed suck

It wasn't intended as a comment on their worthiness - just that I had some idea of the prototypical EIC-type person (super striver, etc) and was surprised this person didn't match it. It seems like OP has similar sorts of ideas about what his board is looking for - interest in legal academia, lol - so I wanted to point out that competent people who, like, give a shit about lawl review seem more likely to actually get elected.

Shrug. If that's too judgmental for TLS, I don't even know what this place is anymore.

That said, agree with the overall conclusion to not bother with any of this crap

[jbagelboy]

I cosign beepboop's post entirely. While it takes a different rhetorical approach to mine, it reaches the same conclusion. The job sucks, and your reasons for pursuing it (striverdom) are bad. You haven't worked to convince any of us.

E.g. There are people attracted to this work by non-terrible reasons.

[Nebby]

Couple of friends were complaining about the field running for EIC on their PI-related journal, because over half the field are people who have neither demonstrated experience in PI nor show any interest in PI.

[A. Nony Mouse]

Just because I feel like sharing anecdotes: I did LR board (though not EIC) because I find the publication process interesting (for a lot of pre-LS career related boring reasons), I like research, I like writing, and I like editing. I was also clerkship gunning and if LR had no utility wrt jobs I don't know if I'd have done it out of sheer selflessness, but for me its employment utility matched my interests and strengths. I also used to have vague aspirations re: publishing, and I think it would have been helpful experience had I pursued them.

Also, while there's a LOT of TERRIBLE scholarship out there, I do think most of what we published was interesting/relevant (given that the LR was going to exist and publish stuff whether I was involved or not, it was nice to have some input into what that was).

For our EIC who was K-JD, I think EIC was a great way to show leadership - there are lots of moving parts and he did an awesome job. Other people could show those same skills in other ways, but it was one way that worked for him. Also it gave him more faculty connections, which is especially helpful in a small legal market like where we were.

But if you're someone who hates journal and finds everything you do for it pointless - which is totally fair - I think it would be stupid to do the board. Do your membership minimum, get the line on your resume, and move on. I just don't think people who don't hate journal are de facto terrible people (they may of course also be terrible people for other reasons).

(Meant to add that I pretty much agree with beeboopbop whose username I doubtless have wrong.)

[beepboopbeep]

beeboopbop

[jbagelboy]

Accidental double subway post

[mephistopheles]

They already know that I can write well and bluebook, as I've proven this through the weekly bluebooking assignments and my well-written note.

these "qualities" would certainly lose my vote.

[BigZuck]

I wasn't saying Bopeep is a terrible person.

I mean, I made the mistake of doing journal too so glass houses, etc.

I was just saying that, IMO, in an ideal world not only will you be above it all, your presence will be so slight and fleeting that you don't even know enough about your fellow editors to have an opinion on their EIC worthiness.

I mean journal is fine, whatever. I like a number of people on it and there's a few that seem gunnery but I just steer clear which I'm sure is Boopit's point. So sorry Robo.

[beepboopbeep]

lol, I am enjoying the various forms of my name going on in this thread. I mean I think we are kinda in the same place after all. There are people who dislike it and people who like it, and the worst are those who are in the former category but pretend to be in the latter because they need a prestige boner or whatever.

[A. Nony Mouse]

beeboopbop

sorry, I was on my phone and being lazy.

[BrooklynLaw16]

There are some convincing arguments here for the position that Law Review EIC is a shitty position. This is awesome because now I won't feel bad at all if I don't get it.

Some people asked about my personal motivations for EIC- honestly, besides the prestige, the fact that it's paid, all that BS...I honestly lIke writing. I sat down and had a long chat with the current EIC, and he said that the one thing that keeps him motivated is the opportunity to read a couple of really interesting articles each year (interposed with many crappy articles), and the opportunity to improve his writing skills.

On my own, I will probably never pick up the Chicago manual of style, because my writing is solid enough to pass the standard bar. I think that LR EIC would force me to reach that next level of writing skill, by constantly doing above the line editing and learning the intracacies of written english.

I did not even apply for managing editor, because I refuse to be a footnote jockey. Leave that to the miserable 2Ls.

With all of this being said, I'd like to share a profound passage about LR:

Literally no one reads law review articles, except students and professors who are writing more law review articles. It is intellectual circle jerking in a very real sense, with each "scholar" jerking off the next "scholar," and then another "scholar" comes in and jerks him off in response, and so on and so forth. They have little significance in the real world, and yet thousands of steaming piles of law review poop are churned out by students and faculty every year.

Please cite this as "the circle jerk theory of law review" with a screen name and a link.

[jbagelboy]

Thats a better answer than prestige or legal academia, so steps in the right direction

Keep working on substance & sincerity. Also don't apply

[A. Nony Mouse]

I don't actually think of the EIC as a writing heavy position. On our LR Article Editors spent much more time on that than the EIC did.

[BigZuck]

I'm editing an article right now about proposed changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the professor is citing a statute from the 13th century. He also loves semicolons and struggles with is/are.

ljl there is absolutely no redeeming value to be had in any of this. Just a bunch of illiterate gasbags gasbagging illiterately all over the page.

[BigZuck]

If the Supreme Court made a grammatical error in its original opinion, but then the author corrected the error when he quoted the SC opinion in his article, should I "correct" the author's quote by putting the error back in?

(stuff I have to think about while editing this garbage)