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Have a quick question. Firstly, what is the blue booking portion of a typical write on competition like, and how long is it? Is it making correction, making citations, or what?

Secondly, what stops people from cheating, or having someone else do their blue book or regular portion? It seems pretty easy?

For the record I'm not planning on cheating, but giving people 7 days just seems like it's inviting this.

The editing portion is a long and absolutely error-riddled piece. Something like 10+ pages. You fix a zillion typos in the body and 100 zillion bluebooking errors in the foot or end notes. It's common for there to be dozens and dozens of errors to correct.

Ethics and Honor stop people from cheating. Not much else.

The bluebooking competition I did for my 1L school was horrific... one of the most brutal things ever. I did really well on it, but I hated every second with a passion.

Thankfully I get to do it again when I do the GULC write-on this week.

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Personally, I just don't cheat because that's not who I am as a person.

But in a law school environment, whether it's a write-on competition or just an exam, the truth is, it's really kind of POINTLESS to cheat. If you know someone who's better than you at Bluebooking or paper-writing, chances are they are (1) already on law review, in which case they wouldn't do it for obvious reasons, (2) trying to get on law review at the same time as you, which means they won't have the time to help you and/or they see you as competition for their OWN spot on law review, or (3) they're a practicing attorney and have better things to do with their time besides helping some first-year law student cheat himself onto law review.

Our Bluebooking portion was a ridiculously error-riddled 15 page paper with footnoted citations. I think it varies from institution to institution.

My school's Bluebooking piece was only two pages and we only had about 15 citations to fix. Then again, our writing portion was extremely broad and difficult, so I guess it all evened out.

As for cheating... it's law school. I can only speak for myself but I would hope nobody would be stupid enough to cheat in law school.

Ethics and prudence. The boost you get from cheating on the write on is likely to be greatly outweighed by the downside--if your cheating is discovered, you might be expelled and probably won't pass C&F. And while the risk of discovery appears slight, people actually do get caught.

disco_barred wrote:The editing portion is a long and absolutely error-riddled piece. Something like 10+ pages. You fix a zillion typos in the body and 100 zillion bluebooking errors in the foot or end notes. It's common for there to be dozens and dozens of errors to correct.

Ethics and Honor stop people from cheating. Not much else.

I think fear stops people from cheating. Law schools spend the first week telling us how well never earn acceptance to the bar if we break the honor code. We all know that if we can't get a law job, paying off the loans will be nearly impossible. I don't think honor has one damn thing to do with it.

BobSacamano wrote:My school's Bluebooking piece was only two pages and we only had about 15 citations to fix. Then again, our writing portion was extremely broad and difficult, so I guess it all evened out.

As for cheating... it's law school. I can only speak for myself but I would hope nobody would be stupid enough to cheat in law school.

edcrane wrote:Ethics and prudence. The boost you get from cheating on the write on is likely to be greatly outweighed by the downside--if your cheating is discovered, you might be expelled and probably won't pass C&F. And while the risk of discovery appears slight, people actually do get caught.

See disco, expulsion and C&F. These are the reasons, not honor and ethics.