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Is it harder to make law review at a bigger school (such as Georgetown, NYU, etc). My impression was that schools adjusted size of the LR membership based upon on the size of the student body. However, I was speaking to someone from NYU, who said it was hard to make law review there because of the large student body. Is there truth to this?

Pomeranian wrote:Is it harder to make law review at a bigger school (such as Georgetown, NYU, etc). My impression was that schools adjusted size of the LR membership based upon on the size of the student body. However, I was speaking to someone from NYU, who said it was hard to make law review there because of the large student body. Is there truth to this?

Highly dependent on the school and even on the year if a lot of people don't do the write-on competition. I don't know how you would be able to figure this out because most people will only have experience with their school. Maybe try to visit law review websites and count the number of members/people in the class?

Very strange criteria to pick a school though. Out of curiosity, why is this a concern for you?

Specifically between HYS, H's size makes it much more difficult. H has like 80 spots and around 200 students turn in completed write on competitions. S and Y have like 60 spots and both have less than 200 total 1ls.

Edit S has 45 spots, so that makes the distinction harder to guess.
Edit again because I was lazy on my first post: s and h both take around 45 and allegedly more people at h turn in a writing comp then 1ls at S. So the conclusion I started with was right, but the numbers were off.

Columbia only takes 45 of the ~200-250 who enter the competition. And picking the 15 (the pure write-on spots) best 3,000 word memos out of a couple hundred submissions is an incredibly idiosyncratic process. There's only so much room for people to separate themselves from the pack on an assignment like that.

It basically comes down to reader-preference on the margins.

GULC is weird as there is no exclusively grade-on spots and a decent number of spots given strictly based on a personal statement (provided you meet minimum write-on score thresholds).

cdotson2 wrote:Specifically between HYS, H's size makes it much more difficult. H has like 80 spots and around 200 students turn in completed write on competitions. S and Y have like 60 spots and both have less than 200 total 1ls.

Edit S has 45 spots, so that makes the distinction harder to guess.

Way fewer than that. HLR takes 46 per year, and SLR takes 45 per year. Given that H has about three times as many students as S but about the same number of law review spots, it must be much, much harder to make law review at H. I think Y's numbers are similar to S's in terms of class size / law review size, but I haven't checked.