Law Review Derailment Thread Forum

[Anonymous User]

New poster in this thread with a similar background to OP (feeder clerk, etc.). Strongly agree that law review is not valuable for T6 applicants. With the new selection criteria, membership is no longer a real signal, and whatever small bump it still gives is usually outweighed by other activities applicants could do with an extra 10+ hours a week not spent bluebooking. The students with the best grades are increasingly not even trying to write on, and I see that trend continuing.

Person that originally derailed the prior thread. As I said there, the “changing selection criteria” thing is bullshit, though it’s become CW among right-of-center types. Most schools have added a small AA component but otherwise kept the traditional criteria in place. If you cared about membership before, there’s no reason not to care about it now. I think LR is largely useless, and doesn’t signal anything (esp without board, esp at write-on-dominated schools where you see 2.7s on LR), but selection criteria aren’t the reason why.

Also fwiw Articles was the most selective group on my LR because it had the academia gunners. It also seemed like one of the least BS LR jobs. But they worked really, really hard during “dump.”

*I can’t speak to T14 anon above’s specific journal, and it’s possible some have gone way off the rails, but the T6 all have very traditional processes.

The reason why you're wrong is that plenty of us, through actual firsthand experience on both sides of the hiring process, have SEEN Law Review lose its signaling effect as a credential relative to even the recent past. That coincides perfectly with the changing selection criteria. It's not some bizarre conspiracy theory among "right-of-center types".

There's reason to credit the relationship as causal rather than correlative, though obviously there's not gonna be some deductive proof of it. And you don't have to bring in the politics to see that. Also, for some top schools (mine was H/Y/S, LR membership is not big to begin with, so the AA component makes a material difference, it's not "small."

Yes, it’s lost its cachet… among conservative judges. (I am a clerk for a conservative feeder fwiw.) I have literally never heard a complaint that LR selection is too holistic from a liberal.

YLJ and SLR are random because they’re straight write-ons, and write-ons are random. HLR is random because it has a major write-on component and is small. Neither are random because a single-digit number of editors got over the bump because of AA.

[Anonymous User]

New poster in this thread with a similar background to OP (feeder clerk, etc.). Strongly agree that law review is not valuable for T6 applicants. With the new selection criteria, membership is no longer a real signal, and whatever small bump it still gives is usually outweighed by other activities applicants could do with an extra 10+ hours a week not spent bluebooking. The students with the best grades are increasingly not even trying to write on, and I see that trend continuing.

Person that originally derailed the prior thread. As I said there, the “changing selection criteria” thing is bullshit, though it’s become CW among right-of-center types. Most schools have added a small AA component but otherwise kept the traditional criteria in place. If you cared about membership before, there’s no reason not to care about it now. I think LR is largely useless, and doesn’t signal anything (esp without board, esp at write-on-dominated schools where you see 2.7s on LR), but selection criteria aren’t the reason why.

Also fwiw Articles was the most selective group on my LR because it had the academia gunners. It also seemed like one of the least BS LR jobs. But they worked really, really hard during “dump.”

*I can’t speak to T14 anon above’s specific journal, and it’s possible some have gone way off the rails, but the T6 all have very traditional processes.

I don't think the entire conservative critique of the process has to do with AA. Law Review used to be a reliable signal for great grades when a judge didn't have intimate knowledge of the school's grading system. However, now that the T6 don't do "grade on," that signaling value is significantly reduced. In addition, "wholistic" doesn't just mean AA. It means whatever piques the interest of the reviewers, which also adds a bit of randomness to the process. Adding to that is the fact that the write-on is not a great proxy for writing ability years down the line. Overall, I think most conservative judges view it as a small plus, but not anything near a necessary condition.

Writing competitions are nothing new—HLR switched from grade-on to write-on in 1969. I agree write-on is near-meaningless fwiw.

https://web.archive.org/web/20050301000 ... nial.shtml

[Anonymous User]

Also, not mentioned here is the fact that Law Reviews don't exist to serve as a signaling function to employers. I bet things like write-on and personal statements are more likely to show who will be good at Bluebooking than someone's grades.

[Anonymous User]

Once flagship LR loses its signaling value, it operates no difference than a secondary journal. That's how dilution works in trademark law, when the name no longer signals quality.

[Anonymous User]

Why wouldn't law review be useful for transactional associates? If one of the primary benefits of law review is its perceived signaling value for hard work and attention to detail, are those not also important in transactional work? I understand that transactional associates may not bluebook as much, but it doesn't sound like law review is most widely valued as a form of bluebook training.

[Anonymous User]

I think those are the arguments that people use in support of corporate folks doing LR. Personally I agree that it signals hard work/attention to detail, but not everyone agrees, and to the extent it signals ability to write extensive stuff (which is also how people view it), it’s much more pertinent to lit.

I don’t think it would hurt someone in corporate to do LR (the EIC of LR my year does transactional real estate work), but I think they can justify skipping it more easily if they don’t want to do it.

[Anonymous User]

As a transactional junior, I sometimes feel like my journal experience is the only thing in law school that's remotely relevant. That and being an RA. Or pretty much any editorial experience, but in journal you read through dense and poorly written text with the eye on minor nits and incorporating comments into text. Not that it actually prepared me for the job, but sitting in a contracts class was even less relevant.

(I did secondary btw. Also would not at all care if someone I interviewed had done a journal)

[Anonymous User]

Why wouldn't law review be useful for transactional associates? If one of the primary benefits of law review is its perceived signaling value for hard work and attention to detail, are those not also important in transactional work? I understand that transactional associates may not bluebook as much, but it doesn't sound like law review is most widely valued as a form of bluebook training.

IMO, a prospective corporate junior would be infinitely better off using the time otherwise spent on law review and working in a transactional clinic (any clinic really, especially ones where they interact directly with clients) or even taking something like financial accounting if the law school allows for law students to take business classes (or accounting for lawyers, or anything that makes law students less scared of numbers).

Being able to communicate with clients in a sane way and not being afraid of accounting concepts/terms/numbers generally are, at least in my opinion and practice, much more important and much more highly praised/noticeable in corporate. That said, I also un-bold a lot of commas day to day, so I guess that could make journal sort of useful, but I was able to figure out how to spot and do that pretty quickly without the toll law review undeniably takes.

Source: I am a corporate associate who did two clinics and took financial accounting, whose roommate was a managing editor of law review (T6). That said, said roommate clerked for a district and COA judge and has had numerous very competitive public interest fellowship bites (still clerking currently) with median or a little above median grades in school, so I wouldn't discount that journal can be useful, especially if the person is a good interviewer and can describe why and how the experience was useful.

[The Lsat Airbender]

If the complaint is that LR used to be just a marker for grades and now it isn't, doesn't that mean that LR as such never actually mattered?

A very long time ago it did matter, because it was generally a grade-on selection process and, IMO, because writing and editing were so much more physically/technically strenuous back then that it was a useful muscle to develop before practice. (So word processing and the Internet are underrated reasons this stuff matters less.) In the decades after WWII, "I'm gonna hire exclusively Law Review people from these 6-7 law schools I know" was a non-idiotic way to approach hiring for a big-city firm or a judge.

But it has basically been a profession-wide hazing ritual for the past 5 decades. The deal: trade some of your time and sanity for some prestige. What's happening since the turn of the millennium is that the people making hiring decisions—boomers but especially Gen X—have only ever known the current model and therefore the façade is finally starting to break.

(Affirmative action is really just a variation on that theme which is more or less salient to people depending on their priors.)

An underrated comment from upthread is that a lot of strong students don't even bother with LR anymore. Even if selection embodied the Platonic ideal of meritocracy, LR membership wouldn't be such a great signal if the applicant pool were mediocre. You can't filter out the non-LR people, because you'll lose a lot of top candidates, and conversely you can't assume a given LR member is especially good at law school or anything else. So that hypothetical "hire LR people" strategy which made sense in the 1960's is completely silly now. It's a weak signal at best.

[Anonymous User]

People have not mentioned networking--I think it's among the most important reasons to do law review. Participating in a shared enterprise is among the best ways to make friends with people you have fewer things in common with. I definitely would not have formed as many relationships without doing LR. The types of people are also a bit different. LR editors are, at least a little, selected for interest in law, intelligence, and tolerance for working hard. That's a potentially useful group to know in 20 years. Apart from LR, I was mostly friends with people who liked to do similar things for fun (or had shared political interests, religion, etc.). Also, you have a bit of a connection to senior people you work with later who did LR at your school, which is useful as a visible, knowable point of commonality (maybe some partner also loves bowling or whatever you love, but it would be hard to learn about everyone that bowls at your firm before talking to all of them).

Also, though you do learn Bluebooking, I think a bigger lesson is obsessively checking source material to make sure every citation or reference is honest and well-supported. That is a difficult, annoying task, but is among the most valuable errors to catch either as a clerk or associate. I think a write-on sub-cite actually tests for this fairly well if it's miserable and long enough.

Both of these are reasons to value LR membership, and both are diluted if the selection criteria are changed to deemphasize the particular kind of merit that LR can signify. So, I'd say, LR is valuable (countering the cynics), but less valuable than it used to be (joining different cynics). If, as some people say, holistic review only pushes single-digit numbers on or off, then it's probably not a big deal. My experience was that it is determinative for about half of editors (this was anonymously tested using prior year numbers). That is enough to transform things.

Is it worth the time? That's a hard question. Secondary journals usually aren't too hard, but I spent about 20 hours a week on LR. Personally, I think it was worth it because I tend to perform better if I'm a bit stretched (and tend to waste extra time on browsing online or whatever). But if you otherwise would be doing something either productive or highly enjoyable, then it's a fairly difficult tradeoff.

Last, I think I identified one plausibly "top" student who did not attempt to get on LR. That's not enough for it to matter. I did know a few who missed it (and would have gotten it using grade-on).

[Anonymous User]

I hated every second of my time on LR at my T20, both 2L doing all that grunt work bluebooking and as a Notes Editor it was even more work (though at least a bit more interesting). It was the most “group work” experience I had in law school, and having to make up the work lazy or incompetent people didn’t do reminded me of why I was glad I didn’t go to business school.

This was a decade ago so I still felt I had to do it. I had one friend whose grades were good enough that she knew her 1L SA would result in a permanent offer and she didn’t even bother trying but otherwise everyone else felt they had to. If students are realizing it’s a massive waste of time good for them. As a hiring manager grades and a good writing sample are far more important to me.

[Anonymous User]

I think the point about the impact of word processing and the internet is a really good one. The work of just putting together an actual publication has changed so much since then, it does take on a completely different meaning than it had at that time.

And I agree that you can’t presume that hiring LR will capture all the top students or exclude not good ones. It’s close but not perfect. Most of the top students in my class ended up on LR, but a couple missed it because it was write-on, and not everyone on LR has top grades. There was definitely an interesting kind of divide in terms of jobs that the LR members ended up in too - it was clearly driven more by grades than just being on LR (leaving aside people like the prosecution/defense runners who wouldn’t touch LR with a ten foot pole and spent their time doing internships in those fields and getting into court as much as possible).

I think LR just becomes one more thing to parse in an applicant’s background - I’m sure some people can use it to their advantage to sell themselves and some can’t.

I had a great experience with the people on my LR - and agree strongly about the networking point - but that obviously varies a lot. It can be really “group work”-y as alluded to, but I lucked out in that that was never an issue, there were at most a couple of people who occasionally blew things off so other people had to do it (at least, to my knowledge; maybe I managed to avoid taking positions that required dealing with that, and maybe that’s key as well? There was one guy the year after me who ran for EIC and no other board position, on the basis that if he couldn’t be EIC he didn’t see a point in doing a position he didn’t like. On the one hand the way he approached it showed that he was kind of full of himself and it was annoying, but on the other, better that he knew that about himself than that he took some other position and made others miserable).

All this said - when I’m looking at resumes (I have some experience with this but not a ton), I do check whether a job applicant has done LR, but it’s wayyyyyy down the list of things I care about even though I did it and enjoyed it. I mean maybe if that was the *only* difference between two candidates, but even then, I can’t imagine weighing it at all. But my office doesn’t hire right out of law school, so there are always actual other achievements and experience to consider.

[existentialcrisis]

Why wouldn't law review be useful for transactional associates? If one of the primary benefits of law review is its perceived signaling value for hard work and attention to detail, are those not also important in transactional work? I understand that transactional associates may not bluebook as much, but it doesn't sound like law review is most widely valued as a form of bluebook training.

IMO, a prospective corporate junior would be infinitely better off using the time otherwise spent on law review and working in a transactional clinic (any clinic really, especially ones where they interact directly with clients) or even taking something like financial accounting if the law school allows for law students to take business classes (or accounting for lawyers, or anything that makes law students less scared of numbers).

Being able to communicate with clients in a sane way and not being afraid of accounting concepts/terms/numbers generally are, at least in my opinion and practice, much more important and much more highly praised/noticeable in corporate. That said, I also un-bold a lot of commas day to day, so I guess that could make journal sort of useful, but I was able to figure out how to spot and do that pretty quickly without the toll law review undeniably takes.

Source: I am a corporate associate who did two clinics and took financial accounting, whose roommate was a managing editor of law review (T6). That said, said roommate clerked for a district and COA judge and has had numerous very competitive public interest fellowship bites (still clerking currently) with median or a little above median grades in school, so I wouldn't discount that journal can be useful, especially if the person is a good interviewer and can describe why and how the experience was useful.

I agree with all of this and I'd also like to add that (1) people who take journals super seriously are just generally the worst and (2) if in an interview someone told me that they didn't do a journal because they thought their time was better spent elsewhere, I would 100 percent view that as a positive.

[Anonymous User]

Yes, it’s lost its cachet… among conservative judges. (I am a clerk for a conservative feeder fwiw.) I have literally never heard a complaint that LR selection is too holistic from a liberal.

YLJ and SLR are random because they’re straight write-ons, and write-ons are random. HLR is random because it has a major write-on component and is small. Neither are random because a single-digit number of editors got over the bump because of AA.

diversity did not bump a single-digit % at my T6 (graduated a few years ago). by that point it was a substantial part of the application process. I know b/c I was on the committee making those decisions.

to illustrate where some journals are at - when I graduated, exec had just proposed ending blind review of student note submissions. that got shot down in a very, very uncomfortable meeting.

[Anonymous User]

Didn't the YLJ controversy last year reveal that everyone scored basically the same on the diversity statement, nullifying any potential AA effect?

[Anonymous User]

diversity did not bump a single-digit % at my T6 (graduated a few years ago). by that point it was a substantial part of the application process. I know b/c I was on the committee making those decisions.

to illustrate where some journals are at - when I graduated, exec had just proposed ending blind review of student note submissions. that got shot down in a very, very uncomfortable meeting.

T14 poster whose school's law review was accurately described as "off the rails." An ever-changing number of members were chosen based on a combination of grades, writing, and the diversity statement. The relative weight of each of those three things was never spelled out, not even internally. That was probably because no one wanted to commit in writing to ranking them in order of importance, much less defend their reasoning for the order they picked. So just in case "ability to contribute to a diversity of views" wasn't vague enough to cause disagreements about an individual's ability to do it, everyone also got to argue over exactly how much higher Candidate A's GPA had to be to overcome Candidate B's more "diverse" views.

Didn't the YLJ controversy last year reveal that everyone scored basically the same on the diversity statement, nullifying any potential AA effect?

I'm genuinely surprised to learn that these are numerically scored at some schools. What does that rubric even look like? +5 for URM, +3 for poverty, +1 for being friends with the reader, -2 for typos? Does the same person score all of them?

[anymouseqwerty]

Law Review identifies people who are willing to spend lots of time working on tedious tasks FOR FREE.

At least it's free. Better than paying $70,000 to do it.

[Anonymous User]

Yes, it’s lost its cachet… among conservative judges. (I am a clerk for a conservative feeder fwiw.) I have literally never heard a complaint that LR selection is too holistic from a liberal.

YLJ and SLR are random because they’re straight write-ons, and write-ons are random. HLR is random because it has a major write-on component and is small. Neither are random because a single-digit number of editors got over the bump because of AA.

diversity did not bump a single-digit % at my T6 (graduated a few years ago). by that point it was a substantial part of the application process. I know b/c I was on the committee making those decisions.

to illustrate where some journals are at - when I graduated, exec had just proposed ending blind review of student note submissions. that got shot down in a very, very uncomfortable meeting.

The trend will accelerate so the question is what it does to the LR "signal"

[Anonymous User]

Yes, it’s lost its cachet… among conservative judges. (I am a clerk for a conservative feeder fwiw.) I have literally never heard a complaint that LR selection is too holistic from a liberal.

YLJ and SLR are random because they’re straight write-ons, and write-ons are random. HLR is random because it has a major write-on component and is small. Neither are random because a single-digit number of editors got over the bump because of AA.

diversity did not bump a single-digit % at my T6 (graduated a few years ago). by that point it was a substantial part of the application process. I know b/c I was on the committee making those decisions.

to illustrate where some journals are at - when I graduated, exec had just proposed ending blind review of student note submissions. that got shot down in a very, very uncomfortable meeting.

This was my experience also. And at least at my T6, the concern was less about AA and more about senior editors using diversity statements to pick their friends out of the pile.

[Anonymous User]

Those who aren’t at elite schools should take some of these comments with a grain of salt.

If you’re from a lower ranked school, law review is very important and a huge advantage regardless of whether you’re going into Corp or Lit.

Sincerely,
T65, top 20%, law review, V5 Corp next year.

[Anonymous User]

Those who aren’t at elite schools should take some of these comments with a grain of salt.

If you’re from a lower ranked school, law review is very important and a huge advantage regardless of whether you’re going into Corp or Lit.

Sincerely,
T65, top 20%, law review, V5 Corp next year.

Those who are at elite schools should take some of these comments with a grain of salt.

I've been involved in many hiring decisions for many highly competitive legal jobs, and law review has uniformly been the single paper criterion that has mattered the most after grades, recommendations, and individual awards. It's undoubtedly true that many in hiring don't particular care about law review, but many do. I don't see that changing any time soon, contrary to what some of the other posters here imply. And after grades, recommendations, and individual awards (about which not everyone cares either), I'm not sure if there's anything else that comes particularly close. Maybe clinic, assuming you did a directly relevant clinic?

So please know when you read the commenters here decrying the importance of law review, that you're getting (a) a view that genuinely reflects one held by many in the field -- but that is not anywhere close to being universal (or even a majority view); and (b) arguments about law review that are often more prescriptive than descriptive.

[Saami]

Law Review is definitely still of use to those interested in academia, specifically. It gives students valuable insight into the process they can use in their own work later; it's also a good networking channel. And to the extent you have JD/PhD students who want to go into legal academia, it's good to see the type of research/writing you need to adopt if it's different from your PhD area.

But yes, even in academia, it's unquestionably of less value as a credential then it used to be.

100% agree with this. I think anyone who's somewhat serious about pursuing legal academia should try to get on law review, and in their second year work as an articles editor. I've just submitted my first full-length article to law reviews/journals, and having been on the receiving end of the process when I was a 2L and engaging in piece selection was probably the most valuable experience I got out of law school.

[Anonymous User]

Those who aren’t at elite schools should take some of these comments with a grain of salt.

If you’re from a lower ranked school, law review is very important and a huge advantage regardless of whether you’re going into Corp or Lit.

Sincerely,
T65, top 20%, law review, V5 Corp next year.

Those who are at elite schools should take some of these comments with a grain of salt.

I've been involved in many hiring decisions for many highly competitive legal jobs, and law review has uniformly been the single paper criterion that has mattered the most after grades, recommendations, and individual awards. It's undoubtedly true that many in hiring don't particular care about law review, but many do. I don't see that changing any time soon, contrary to what some of the other posters here imply. And after grades, recommendations, and individual awards (about which not everyone cares either), I'm not sure if there's anything else that comes particularly close. Maybe clinic, assuming you did a directly relevant clinic?

So please know when you read the commenters here decrying the importance of law review, that you're getting (a) a view that genuinely reflects one held by many in the field -- but that is not anywhere close to being universal (or even a majority view); and (b) arguments about law review that are often more prescriptive than descriptive.

What do you mean by "paper criterion"? From elite schools, law review matters less than post-grad employment, clerkships, grades, recommendations (to include TA/RA work), any individual awards (to include writing awards and moot court awards), and publications in reputable journals. Maybe clinic / pro bono also, depending on the program. It matters more than any other extracurricular, but extracurriculars count for little generally.

[Anonymous User]

itt butthurt normies defend their decision to be unpaid copyeditors for gen-xer law profs who spend their time engaging in “discourse” Twitter.

MOD NOTE: USER dyemond OUTED FOR ANON ABUSE.

[Saami]

itt butthurt normies defend their decision to be unpaid copyeditors for gen-xer law profs who spend their time engaging in “discourse” Twitter.

First, you don't know how to use "normie" properly. Spend some time on /r9k/ and you'll eventually figure it out.

Second, have you considered the fact that some people just enjoy things that you might not? I genuinely liked being on law review, despite its downsides. There's no "defending" my decision. It's just the truth.