Fordham Law School - UWC - please post journal updates here! Forum

[270910]

Couldn't matter less. Journal work isn't collaborative. You can all decide to do it in a room together, but for the most part you'll get your assignment and a due date and have one party a semester or something and that's that. Flip a coin? Do the one that requires less work?

Actually, definitely do the one that requires less work.

Keep in mind that if substance is really what you're interested in, there's nothing stopping you from writing about topic A even if you're on journal B.

Thank you for your advice. I actually didn't know the bolded. Can you get a note about topic A published in journal B, though?

You can get an article about topic A published in any legal journal in the country. In fact, it's much more impressive to publish outside of your school. You can write a note and get it published in the journal you work on or often another of your school's journals, but it's more impressive to get it published somewhere else as an Article. Slightly more difficult in all likelihood, but only marginally considering the threshold effort required to produce a piece of legal scholarship.

[Anonymous User]

I made Urban and IPLJ, and I feel incredibly lucky, but I am at a loss and I have to decide by tomorrow. I know Urban is regarded as the better journal (generally considered second to LR in prestige), and it has a larger alumni base, but I am interested in IP (would have an easier time picking a note topic), and several of my friends will be joining IPLJ. There is also the blog, which is pretty cool. If it were feasible I would definitely do both, but does Fordham even let us? Besides, I know people are waiting and I would not want to take a spot from one of my classmates.

do we really think this is true in the eyes of those outside the fordham community (specifically employers)? i mean i obviously understand the hard facts (2nd oldest journal, only other besides LR with a grade cut-off, rankings, readership, etc), but do we really think LR>urban>everything else? esp. if you have a practice area of interest as you do?

[270910]

I made Urban and IPLJ, and I feel incredibly lucky, but I am at a loss and I have to decide by tomorrow. I know Urban is regarded as the better journal (generally considered second to LR in prestige), and it has a larger alumni base, but I am interested in IP (would have an easier time picking a note topic), and several of my friends will be joining IPLJ. There is also the blog, which is pretty cool. If it were feasible I would definitely do both, but does Fordham even let us? Besides, I know people are waiting and I would not want to take a spot from one of my classmates.

do we really think this is true in the eyes of those outside the fordham community (specifically employers)? i mean i obviously understand the hard facts (2nd oldest journal, only other besides LR with a grade cut-off, rankings, readership, etc), but do we really think LR>urban>everything else? esp. if you have a practice area of interest as you do?

No. People at schools will likely know which journals are old, which are hard to get on, which are not, which publish more, which less, which get cited often and which have never been cited, etc. But if will not matter to any employer anywhere ever even a little bit, because no practitioner has ever read a law review or journal article. Ever. So they don't care. In fact, if one ever does read an LR article, the world might will quite literally stop the process and start running documentaries on the event.

[FLS08]

I was in basically the same situation--accepted to all journals other than LR, was interested in IP, and in fact was already working as a patent agent at a law firm while attending Fordham. I chose ULJ, but honestly I don't think it matters that much in terms of employment prospects. In your shoes, I would go with the journal that I would most enjoy working on (or, perhaps more precisely, dislike working on least). ULJ actually appealed to me because I wanted to get some more non-IP exposure and I liked the thought of my fellow journal members being, on average, relatively successful students with more varied legal interests. True, you won't spend much of your time discussing legal theories published in your journal, but if the topic of a note/article that you are editing actually interests you, you obviously have the option of reading the whole note/article (many of my friends did this). Plus if you write a note, it's much, much more pleasant to do it on a topic that interests you. While it's true that you can theoretically publish anywhere, in practice it's just easier to do it within the process and structure of the journal you're on, where the journal's editors will help you select the topic, polish it to meet the journal's publication criteria, etc.