Georgiana wrote:Just to expand a little on the grading end of things...kurla88 wrote:You get on law review, and most of the secondary journals, via the write-on competition, which occurs a couple of days after your spring finals. There's the in-class portion, for which you basically spend two days doing bluebook citations locked in a room. Except that you're free to leave whenever and come back. ^.^ It's two days, ten hours each. There's basically an exaggeratedly bad article that you have to edit.texasgirl22 wrote:Thanks for all of the help!
Could someone tell me how law review works?
Once you turn that in, you get a take-home essay, for which you don't have to be in Philly at all. It's due like a week later, and doesn't have to be anything law related. They give you a bunch of random (like New Yorker etc) articles and stuff, and you just come up with a thesis and write a short essay. There's also a separate personal statement, for which most people seem to reuse their law school personal statement.
When you register for the write-on, you rank your journal choices in order. The exact selection process for the journals isn't open, but basically it's some combination of your grades and your write-on score, so at some point after spring grades come back, you'll hear which journal you got on.
Not something you need to be worrying about any time soon, though.
The law review is in charge of grading the essays and the editing. The personal statements are distributed to all journals and each grades them on their own. For the editing, they grade not only based on "correctness" but also the number of changes made.
The impact of each portion is set by each journal independently. The law review typically has the most intricate process. They take the top x portion of the class by grades and ensure that they are in the top x percentage of the writing competition (last year it was top 60% or something). Then they take the top x percentage of the writing competition and ensure that they are the top x percentage of the class by grades. Then there are people who make LR based on their personal statements (basically an excuse for AA/"diversity" in LR... sorry...).
The process is repeated for the other journals but generally they just do a percentage weight for each portion (essay, grades, editing, and PS) based on what they value most (for JIL this year I think we decided to weight the editing portion the most heavily because we EE's want good editors! haha).
Dean Clinton is the one who decides who goes to what journal. The journals don't see your grades and all writing comp grading is done by exam number.
Once you're on a journal you start with editing. You get an edit either electronically or on paper (LR does paper edits) and you fix the article. Then you repeat with another section etc and so forth. Law review puts out the most issues per year which is why they are the most work. The other thing you do with journals is write a comment. For some journals it is required and for others it isn't. Law review requires them. This is a 35-50 page paper on some current area of law based on your interests. If you do a really good job, you may get it published.
At the beginning of 2nd semester, board applications will go out and you can decide if you want to be on board during 3L.
If you have more questions let me know.
Can you give an estimate as to what class percentile you must occupy to get on law review? 25%? 50%? Thanks!
) Obviously it depends on the LSAT going well, but even then some schools are anti-splitter.
