Law Review--A Waste of Time?

My law partner (who is also my wife) is one of those people who, like Sherry at Stay of Execution, has always been skeptical that much good comes to law students by serving on their school's law review. So the way I see it, Sherry's in good company when she writes that law review is a waste of time.

Still, I can't agree with her analysis. In her post, Sherry uses her considerable writing abilities to argue that law review is not much more than an opportunity for the third years to haze the second years--to "inflict . . . colossal drudgery on others." She lists a number of things wrong with the system, then calls for comment:

Maybe there are passionately happy law students out there staffing journals because they dig it? Could you guys speak up? Practicing lawyers who discovered something they could have gotten nowhere else on law review? Please no "It's a good experience -- I survived it, so should everyone else" war stories. The law has enough stupid hazing experiences. I'm interested in positive law review stories that are not about the institution of law review but about the day-to-day experience of what it really is.

I'm one of those "practicing lawyers," and I must say my experience was different than Sherry's. I do agree that cite-checking was drudgery. But as I recall about another job I once held (my first), dishwashing was drudgery too. In both cases, the drudgery didn't last all that long, and was necessary for what happened next: from dishwasher, I was eventually promoted to cook, and at the law review, I was promoted to managing editor. (The dishwashing example is pedestrian, perhaps, but you get the point. Don't get me started about the drudgery I experienced in my early days as a lawyer).

As someone who actually stuck with law review, I'm not subject, like Sherry or my wife, to the criticism that I'm reviewing a movie I didn't get a chance to see. I saw the movie. But I also think I watched it in a different light than some law review critics, since I overlooked the social politics and viewed law review like I did any organization that published a newspaper or magazine. These sorts of organizations were interesting to me despite their tendency to spawn petty infighting and backbiting. And like all publishing outfits, law review had a interesting subversive aspect: we were a group of students, not yet graduated from law school, who put out four issues of the journal from start to finish with zero input from the faculty. As far as I know, this lack-of-oversight was common to law journals across the land, and it provided a welcome antidote to the epidemic of law faculty pompousness that's still with us today.

So to answer Sherry's question, what was valuable about the experience? Once you got over the initial cite-checking hurdle, all of the third year editorial staff, from the editor-in-chief on down, learned skills like these: how to manage large projects to completion, how to take a small budget and use it to accomplish large things, how to manage a distracted staff, each working on a little piece of a giant puzzle. These lessons were in addition to all the good that came from learning about editing and fact-checking (skills often learned the hard way, since even some of the best stuff we accepted for publication had to be substantially rewritten. The authors of the articles, by the way, gladly accepted this "student editing").

Are all of these benefits nullified by the tendency of those who work on law review to want to lord it over others? I would gladly join Sherry in mocking anyone who thinks that working on a law review at whatever level makes them a candidate for special praise, or gives them license to look down on others. And I agree with Sherry's point that serving on law review might be overrated as a hiring criterion, since the skills one learns on the law review do not translate directly into an ability to be a good lawyer. On the other hand, those who do stick it out can feel good that they contributed something of value both to the institutions where they studied, and to the continuing development of legal knowledge and thinking. I certainly don't regret working on the law review.

Comments

[Meghan]

i would hardly call those students who so desperately fight for a "coveted" spot on their resume, oops, I mean coveted spot on law review (Freudian slip?) as a "subversive" crowd. In fact, they are probably the dryest group in school because these are the students who fight so hard for the "I'm supposed to do this because I am supposed to" tasks available to them in law school rather than choosing to do things based on interest, or passion.