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are non-review journals highly respected? are they as demanding as being on review? are the admission criteria less than review?

on another note, how important is student life (clubs, teams etc) at law schools?

I've heard that they can be helpful if they're in your practice area. For example, I want to work in civil rights, and Harvard has a Civil Rights-Civil Liberties journal. Some attorney friends of mine say that would be viewed favorably in an interview.

No, Not even close, Emphatically Yes.

Student life is... I mean, important is a weird word to use for it. Not at all for employment prospects.

Highly "respected?" Depends significantly on the journal. There are some specific secondaries at T1 schools that are very well regarded.

"Respected" is a relative term - virtually no one you'll meet out in the real world (practice & otherwise) cares about a journal other than the fact that you have it on your resume.

Less work? That depends. Many secondary journals only do two issues per year. Some do 4 or more. The latter will involve roughly as much labor as law review. All journals ordinarily require you to write your own piece so amount of work is a function of the cite checking, which is a function of how many articles they are doing.

Less competitive? Depends on the application process for your law review & your secondaries, respectively. More people ordinarily want to do law review, but if you mostly grade-on at your school, that's irrelevent; at the same time, a secondary might only take people who have topic proposals and resumes & such that show real commitment.

These are all student-run entities that have their individual by-laws & the like. Other than "law review best" it's quite hard to generalize.

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The unspoken question is "should I do a secondary if I don't do law review?" The answer to that is an emphatic "Yes, unless you want to deliberately cut your own throat for most forms of employment and all forms of clerkships."