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I've been reading about getting on LR/Secondary Journals, and I'm a little confused on how journals pick students, especially at schools with multiple journals. Clearly LR gets first dibs of the students they want, but then how do secondary journals pick students? I know that a lot of journals will use different formulas, even at the same school, but it makes me wonder what happens if two journals want the same people, and how they can keep consistent numbers when offering spots.

Different for every school. At my school the journals use a joint competition. You rank what journal you want to be on from 1-3. Obviously 99% of the population will rank LR first. We have two secondary journals. If both journals select you, you'd get the offer for which ever one you ranked higher. They use different grading metrics, so it's entirely possible you'd only get an offer for one secondary.

bc2wf11 wrote:I've been reading about getting on LR/Secondary Journals, and I'm a little confused on how journals pick students, especially at schools with multiple journals. Clearly LR gets first dibs of the students they want, but then how do secondary journals pick students? I know that a lot of journals will use different formulas, even at the same school, but it makes me wonder what happens if two journals want the same people, and how they can keep consistent numbers when offering spots.

Our school uses a bid system. Students bid on journals, ranking each one.

All the journals will review your app and say if they want you.
The system goes down your bid list. The first match you get is the offer you get. You only get one offer.

Hence, if you rank LR #1 and a secondary journal as #2, and you get matched for both, you will get an offer for LR.

However, if you rank LR #2 and a secondary journal X as #1, and you get matched for both, you will get an offer for secondary journal X.

Using this method, you don't know how many journals accepted you. You can know how many at least how many rejected you based on how far you are down the list

It depends on the school. At NU, no journal gets dibs over other journals. Students are asked to rank journals (and most people rank LR first) and you get an offer from the journal you ranked highest that accepts you. There are no double offers. At other schools, there are overlapping journal offers.

Ok good to know - thanks everyone for the help!

Just going to piggyback on this thread since my question is relevant, from browsing the various LR threads I've seen there is a GPA cutoff for the write-on competition. How high does this tend to be (roughly, since I'm guessing varies from school to school)?

bc2wf11 wrote:I've been reading about getting on LR/Secondary Journals, and I'm a little confused on how journals pick students, especially at schools with multiple journals. Clearly LR gets first dibs of the students they want, but then how do secondary journals pick students? I know that a lot of journals will use different formulas, even at the same school, but it makes me wonder what happens if two journals want the same people, and how they can keep consistent numbers when offering spots.

You should ask specifically at the school you are attending. At my school, any journal except for law review is open to anyone.

Nonconsecutive wrote:Just going to piggyback on this thread since my question is relevant, from browsing the various LR threads I've seen there is a GPA cutoff for the write-on competition. How high does this tend to be (roughly, since I'm guessing varies from school to school)?

Does vary. At my school there's 32 spots. 16 go to the top writing scores. 16 go to the top 16 gpas in the class.

arklaw13 wrote:

Nonconsecutive wrote:Just going to piggyback on this thread since my question is relevant, from browsing the various LR threads I've seen there is a GPA cutoff for the write-on competition. How high does this tend to be (roughly, since I'm guessing varies from school to school)?

Does vary. At my school there's 32 spots. 16 go to the top writing scores. 16 go to the top 16 gpas in the class.

All these questions vary so much depending on the school you're in. My school, theoretically, has no GPA cutoff for law review. You need to specifically identify your school to get any meaningful information.

ph14 wrote:

arklaw13 wrote:

Nonconsecutive wrote:Just going to piggyback on this thread since my question is relevant, from browsing the various LR threads I've seen there is a GPA cutoff for the write-on competition. How high does this tend to be (roughly, since I'm guessing varies from school to school)?

Does vary. At my school there's 32 spots. 16 go to the top writing scores. 16 go to the top 16 gpas in the class.

All these questions vary so much depending on the school you're in. My school, theoretically, has no GPA cutoff for law review. You need to specifically identify your school to get any meaningful information.

That is what I figured, I'll return once I have a school. Thanks!