It’s been a couple of years since I was in law school. Okay, decades. But it was like yesterday (as much as I can remember yesterday). But when I was in law school, we suffered professorial abuse because we wanted to be lawyers. And we believed that they knew what was best. After all, they were the professors and we were only students. The paper chase was alive and well.
So it is with abject fascination that I read Professor Daniel Solove write about the law review season. First, I didn’t even know that there was such season. If there are no shoulder pads involved, the seasons all blend together for me. But apparently not only is there a season, but it is one where the professors are the players and the law students, hereinafter referred to as Your Royal Highness, Law Review Editor Sir, set the rules of the game.
Wow, the glee on those editors faces as the law professors scramble for position, jockeying their articles into place to be the first to get published by the Biglaw Schools. You know, the law reviews that really count because all the other law professors want to get published there.
My, how the playing field levels. The letter quoted in the post is downright casual, with some law review editor talking to a person who needs her far more than she needs him. The letter makes that pretty clear. Oh, to be a law review editor during the fall season. I wonder, do the professors send candy or cookies with their submission? It couldn’t hurt.
I’m not denigrating legal scholarship, unless it involves Harry Potter. Indeed, I love law review articles, particularly those demonstrating a deeper understanding of how appellate courts are influenced by totally extraneous factors so that their platitudes take on the fuller meaning of harsh reality and personality quirks. But given the publish or perish demands of higher education, it is a sweet irony that these third year students get to wrap their dirty little hands around the throats of accomplished professors and squeeze. Just a little.
And before anybody asks, I was never on law review. I worked for a living to make it through law school, and such unpaid endeavors left me with an unpleasant taste in my mouth. It was the taste of hunger, and I didn’t care for it.
These law review editors should enjoy this brief moment in the sun, when they have the opportunity for a little payback for the Socratic method. In a year, they will be trying to work 7200 billable hours into the year, with a lot of other lawyers telling them how high to jump. The bucolic summer intern days will be nothing more than a fond memory as the crack of the whip snaps them out of their reverie. Enjoy making those professors miserable now, Your Highnesses, as the glory fades quickly once you’re out in the real world.
So it is with abject fascination that I read Professor Daniel Solove write about the law review season. First, I didn’t even know that there was such season. If there are no shoulder pads involved, the seasons all blend together for me. But apparently not only is there a season, but it is one where the professors are the players and the law students, hereinafter referred to as Your Royal Highness, Law Review Editor Sir, set the rules of the game.
Wow, the glee on those editors faces as the law professors scramble for position, jockeying their articles into place to be the first to get published by the Biglaw Schools. You know, the law reviews that really count because all the other law professors want to get published there.
My, how the playing field levels. The letter quoted in the post is downright casual, with some law review editor talking to a person who needs her far more than she needs him. The letter makes that pretty clear. Oh, to be a law review editor during the fall season. I wonder, do the professors send candy or cookies with their submission? It couldn’t hurt.
I’m not denigrating legal scholarship, unless it involves Harry Potter. Indeed, I love law review articles, particularly those demonstrating a deeper understanding of how appellate courts are influenced by totally extraneous factors so that their platitudes take on the fuller meaning of harsh reality and personality quirks. But given the publish or perish demands of higher education, it is a sweet irony that these third year students get to wrap their dirty little hands around the throats of accomplished professors and squeeze. Just a little.
And before anybody asks, I was never on law review. I worked for a living to make it through law school, and such unpaid endeavors left me with an unpleasant taste in my mouth. It was the taste of hunger, and I didn’t care for it.
These law review editors should enjoy this brief moment in the sun, when they have the opportunity for a little payback for the Socratic method. In a year, they will be trying to work 7200 billable hours into the year, with a lot of other lawyers telling them how high to jump. The bucolic summer intern days will be nothing more than a fond memory as the crack of the whip snaps them out of their reverie. Enjoy making those professors miserable now, Your Highnesses, as the glory fades quickly once you’re out in the real world.
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Wow, I haven’t been called Your Royal Highness in a while. I’ve forgotten how nice that sounds. Even if it was me saying it out loud in my office. That is a funny post though.
As a former law review editorial board member at a “good” school, I think you’re being somewhat disingenuous about editorial board attitudes.
Yes, the process puts students in the position of judging professors’ academic work, but most of them take that responsibility very seriously, respect the professors’ work and the professors themselves, and don’t abuse the authority the system gives them. Generally, articles editors–those responsible for selecting articles and working with authors, take those jobs, as opposed to other editorial board positions, because they are generally interested in legal academic research and in finding high quality scholarship for their journals, not becuase they want to abuse academics. Don’t forget that law review editorial board members are those students who do well in law school; they have a vested interest in the validity of the law review system, which has annointed them as the academic vanguard of their schools.
The real question we should be asking is whether students are qualified, after a mere two years of experience in the legal world, and primarily theoretical experience at that, to judge which law review articles contribute to the field and which do not. Most of the time, they probably don’t, which is why so much crap scholarship is published, and why the same few star professors are published again and again, even when they don’t have much new of interest to say (editors will publish them just because they know the name). Law reviews should probably be peer edited, like journals in any other academic field. But the current system is so well-entrenched, and serves the existing power structures in legal academia so well, that it is unlikely to change in the forseeable future.
I couldn’t agree more with the second part of your comment, but do you realize how the second impacts the first? Of course the students take it seriously. Law review is very serious business for both students and professors, but for very different reasons. Who are a bunch of law students to sit in judgment of legal scholarship, select articles and “work” with authors? Most of the professors weren’t exactly the class idiots in law school either, yet they need the ever-changing crop of newly annointed editors to tell them what constitutes scholarship?
Of course the students don’t think of the system as being backwards. Why would they? But now that you’re on the outside looking in, do you still think that professors should be in the position of begging children for approval? What critical perspective do law students bring to the mass of scholarly research? Indeed, the “star” law professors could publish their shopping list in a third rate law school law review, while a brilliant piece of scholarship by an “unknown” law prof would never make the first cut at a top tier school. If you were a law prof, how would you view being subjugated to beggar before some “students who do well in law school.”
Scott,
Talk to us about why you think it matters.
When is the last time you, an adversary, or a court cited a law review article in one of your cases?
While I do, on rare ocassion, cite to a law review article, But that’s really not where this post heads. It was more the interesting interplay between student and professor, where they shifted relative power, and the concerns that arose to the professor side of the equation as a result.
Hey, sometimes we have to look beyond our sphere. Just as I suggest that other elements of the law ignore the practical aspect, we shouldn’t ignore the academic.
Teaching Jury Selection
Scott Greenfield has been having a discussion with his multiple personalities, all of whom are named “Steve”, about what to do with 3Ls (presumably when they’re not on law review, tormenting law profs). Scott and the Steves propose actually teaching law s