Female Law School Students and Legal Reviews

Ms. INSTRUMENTAL GOT such good grades her first year of law school that she obtained a place on the University of Chicago Law Review. When she interviewed with firms the next year for a job for the coming summer, the interviewers would glance at her resume. "Oh, you made law review?" they would say. "What can we tell you about our firm?" The offers came rolling in.

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Midwestern Law Review's Ms. Daughter did not get grades that qualified her for law review her first year. When she started interviewing for jobs with firms for a summer job, the big, prestigious firms she started interviewing would not give her the time of day, so she canceled the rest of her interviews to concentrate on trying to get onto law review another way.

Carol Counselor had grades good enough for Ivy League Law Review, but she also had a sensational summer job and didn't have time to stick around to do the requisite work. So she turned it down. Because of her fabulous grades and references, she obtained a prestigious judicial clerkship without being on law review, so obviously grades alone are sufficient in most circumstances. Indeed, one reason law review matters is that judges and employers simply treat it as a quick way to find out what vour first-vear grades were, and of course, the actual grades would also be proof of that! However, now Carol's thinking about going into law teaching, and she's wondering if she didn't make a mistake not doing law review after all.

What is law review, that $90,000 law firm jobs or access to the prestigious legal academy seems to ride on it?

The catalog of Rutgers (Camden), the State University of New Jersey, describes the "journal" as follows:

The Rutgers Law Journal is a professional publication devoted to critical discussions of current legal problems. . . .
Participation in the work of the Rutgers Law Journal affords students a unique opportunity for intellectual and professional growth. . . .

Invitations for staff positions are extended to a limited number of first-year students on the basis of their academic achievement in the first year of law school and a writing competition. Other students are encouraged to compete for Rutgers Law Journal membership through subsequent open writing competitions.

Although this is a fairly neutral-sounding statement, the author of Rutgers Camden's catalog gives the careful reader a hint about what's really going on: "a unique opportunity for . . . professional growth." With a few exceptions for people like Carol, the staff and editors of the named law review, in this case the Rutgers Law Journal, are the 20 percent who don't have psychic wounds to lick. The people not on the law review are the rest.

I don't think all the benefits of a law school diploma-or many law school diplomas-are exhausted by students in the top 20 percent. There are down-to-earth human beings who believe that well-paid jobs in pleasant surroundings with interesting clients are quite a large benefit of obtaining a law degree, and the University of Chicago, for example, has the highest rate of big-firm job placement in the country. There are even people who believe that moving into the professional middle class that such jobs represent is a benefit not to be scoffed at. After law school, many things can happen. Bill Clinton didn't make law review.

However, scoring big on law school grades and making law review can certainly set the stage for a lifelong career. My favorite example of this is Joel Klein, the hotshot head of the Justice Department Antitrust Division-in other words, the United States' point man in the big suit against Microsoft. Klein, around fifty, emerged from the Bronx to attend Columbia University, was articles editor of the Harvard Law Review, and graduated magna cum laude, which fewer than 5 percent of law students achieve. As day follows night, he moved right up from the Harvard Law Review to a clerkship for federal appeals court judge David Bazelon, followed in lockstep by the highest honor-a Supreme Court clerkship with Lewis Powell. After clerking, Klein held a variety of prestigious law firm jobs, at his own firm and with others, specializing in appellate argument, which is the closest thing the practice has to offer to the experience of being a successful first-year law student. As a grown-up successful law student, he represented a variety of interests, arguing in the Supreme Court an awesome ten times, lending his talents along the way to such movements for social change as the effort to make educational institutions answer- able for sexual harassment and the movement to increase minority representation in the U.S. Congress. He came to know President Clinton. He joined the administration in the summer of 1993 in the office of White House Counsel and thereafter at Justice. By all reports, Klein is a brilliant and gifted man, but, reading his resume, there is no question in my mind that his success as a first- year law student at Harvard in 1968 was a big piece of the springboard from which his career was launched.

Law review is by no means a guarantee that you'll be Joel Klein in thirty years. One study revealed that law review at Case Western Reserve School of Law actually reduced women's lifetime earnings! The perverse explanation for this may be that women on law review actually had a better shot at the low-paying, but very competitive, public interest jobs. If so, women got more of what they wanted, even though money was not a priority for them. It remains the case, then, that if you want to squeeze the maximum career advantage out of your three years at law school, it is usually better to be on law review than not to be. You will be more likely to get a good-paying firm job during the summer and after graduation, as Instrumental and Daughter learned. You will be more likely to get a prestigious clerkship with a high-status judge. You will be more likely to wind up as the head of the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department when the moment comes to take on Microsoft and earn a place in history, or infamy. You are now well ahead of your fellow first-year students, because you know what lies behind the "unique professional opportunity" of law review, and you know what the goal of a substantial number of first-year students is. The goal is membership on law review. One of our criteria for ranking the schools according to women-friendliness is whether women make law review in pro-portion to their proportion in the class.

There is another reason why women should strive to make law review. It is indeed "a unique tradition in the legal world to accept as authoritative professional journals that are written, edited, and published by" students. What Rutgers Camden's catalog doesn't tell you is that most of what law reviews publish are articles from faculty at other law schools. Because of this setup, which is the result of a bizarre history in the legal profession and in the legal academy, the students get to pick which of their teachers' articles get published and where. And, believe me, it makes a big difference to the teachers if their articles are published in the Harvard Law Review or the Crummy Law Review.

Since the system is so irrational, many faculty members bail out and do different things like write books for professional editors and publishers. But one very important group doesn't have that option: the untenured members of the faculty. Accordingly, the mostly white male editorial boards of the high-status law reviews are essentially picking the future teachers of the legal profession. In 1995, only Stanford and Iowa, of all the top twenty U.S. News elite law schools, had a law review membership that was more than half female, and most of the elite law reviews were under 40 percent female.

Considering what an opportunity for abuse this position is, the student editors of the past few decades have a pretty good record of trying to select articles of merit, rather than playing politics. However, I have certainly seen young faculty sucking up to the conservative law review editors who gather every year at the national meeting of the Federalist Society and heard stories of other political influences on article selection. In case you think the law review editors don't take their politics seriously, the legendary attack on the recently murdered Mary Jo Frug at the Harvard Law Review banquet in 1992 actually sprang from two conservative white editors who had opposed publishing an article she had written. I know a young law teacher who didn't show up anywhere as a professional scholar in the database of published law review articles for many, many years after graduating law school, at which point she produced an antifeminist tract and landed in the pages of the Harvard Law Review. Maybe her antifeminist article was just a terrific piece of legal analysis, but somehow the "merit" of her other writing just never got noticed. Certainly, her chances of tenure went way up as a result of this student decision to publish her work.

Not only do the law reviews play a role in shaping the membership of the future faculties, the law reviews remain a place where important social ideas sometimes get launched. The Legal Services Corporation was the product of a law review article in the early 1960s. Robert Bork's expressed opposition to the Supreme Court decision defending birth control was a law review gem; so were the words that defeated Lani Guinier, President Clinton's nominee for civil rights chief. The battle over gun control is being fought out in the pages of law reviews right now, and so is the argument over the morality of African Americans engaging injury nullification in response to an allegedly racist criminal justice system. The politics of law review articles matter. The only people who say they don't are the ones who don't want to give up control of what gets published.

So politics is hardly an unknown quantity in the law review process. There are certainly white men of good faith in these dominant positions. I am going to write about one of them in this article. And everyone knows women who get onto editorial boards and pull the drawbridge up behind them, advancing no female-oriented political agenda. Nonetheless, the chances of white male editors selecting articles advocating serious social change are just a little less than they would be if the beneficiaries of social change were present during the process when articles are selected. Remember the difference between the expressed beliefs and priorities of female voters and male voters. Remember the rape discussion in Mary Lou Fellows's crim law class.

Selection Criteria

Different institutions have different law review selection processes. Almost without exception, the student-run journals themselves set the policy, although the policy usually reflects the political atmosphere of the institution. Since journals are for writing and editing scholarly articles about the law, most of them require some sort of performance on a uniformly administered writing test at the end of the first year. At the less women-friendly end are the admissions based strictly or mostly on first-year grades. As we have seen, a tiny difference in first-year grades can keep you off law review. Women do less well than men the first year, and then pretty much catch up the second and third years. So using first- year grades as the entrance test to law review has the effect, if not the intent, of reducing the representation of women. (Coincidentally, this policy also serves to keep many minorities off the law review.) At the University of Chicago, grades count heavily, because anyone in the top 10 percent of the class, fifteen people, are entitled to membership if they did no more than a good-faith effort at the writing test.

Other schools administer a job-related entrance test based on the students' ability to analyze a problem, write up their analysis, and put documents into the weird form law reviews have traditionally demanded. This is called the writing competition. Most schools use a mixture of grades and writing ability. In some of such mixed competitions, anyone in some top percentage of the class on first-year grades can compete, and half of the contestants will be chosen based on their success in the writing competition.

Mixed qualification systems are a mixed blessing. Northwestern law review editor Michele Landis analyzed the selection process there and she found that the grades requirement eliminates most minorities, while she found women having a worse time getting through the writing competition. The Northwestern law review study, Landis says, found that male readers evaluated women's writing in the competition poorly. In 1995, Northwestern's law review was only 33 percent women from an applicant pool of 43 percent women, tied for a low fifteen out of the twenty schools I examined. On the other hand, Ms. Persistence benefited greatly from the emphasis on writing. She describes herself as having the lowest grades of anyone on law review because she barely made the cut to compete in the writing contest, ranking approximately number fifty in her class of two hundred. Nonetheless, because Persistence scored above many of her higher-ranking classmates on the writing contest, she is a fully functioning member of law review. Even the heavily grade-oriented Chicago system is actually a mixed system, allowing the 130 or so students in the "bottom" 90 percent of the class to compete in the writing contest for the ten or so spots remaining after selecting the top fifteen first- year students for easy entry.

Finally, after any formal writing competition, many law reviews allow any high-rolling class member a second chance to use his writing skills by trying to write a publishable student article during their second year, a process called "writing on" to law review. The write-on process is not to be confused with the writing competition, which takes place at the end of the first year. In writing on, the risk-embracing second-year student just takes a chance that her piece will be good enough, writing a student note along with carrying a full load of academic classes, and submitting the piece to the editorial board. This was the strategy of the student I'll call Ms. Risk, and it worked.

Despite these alternative ways of making law review, "making" law review is more of a symbol of getting high first-year grades than doing the actual work of law review in many places. First, unless, like Carol Counselor, you have an irresistible opportunity after your first year, if you qualify for the writing competition, you should try out. Like cramming for the LSAT, time invested in doing well on the writing contest for three days after the end of your first year bears a disproportionate weight in your future.

How to Succeed in the Writing Competition

The writing competition is essentially the first-year exam, but it takes three days, usually right at the end of the first year, rather than three hours. A uniform problem is devised by the law review or, in some schools, by all the journals, who then share in the results. At some schools, the problem is "closed book," that is, the editors devise a problem, like the eighteen-/sixteen-year-old problem we've been addressing, and they provide the contestants with copies of all the relevant precedents, cases, statutes, etc., that apply. They hand out the problem and the contestants have three days to produce a short written analysis of the problem. The competition consists of analyzing the problem sharply from the cases already decided, writing up the analysis clearly, and using the weird and complex citation form the law reviews require. (The citation process involves, in most places, the Blue Book, a manual of citation published by a consortium of top law reviews.) Since all the relevant authorities are provided, research skill does not enter into the closed-book example.

I'm going to describe the typical student law review note in the section on writing onto law review later, but it's useful to know what the finished notes look like even for the abbreviated writing competition. The most obvious way to find out what a student note looks like is to read the student notes from the last few years of your school's law review, information readily available in the law school library. Do this before the writing competition opens, so you don't waste precious time during the competition learning something you could have done months earlier. The typical law review note, as you will see later, has a different form from the papers you used to write. It's more redundant and it's more rigid. You will not have time to write a fully formed note during the three-day competition, but reading existing notes will give you a model.

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You will probably see that the writing competition, like most law school problems, follows the issue, rule, analysis, conclusion routine I've already described for test taking. Most analyses of a particular rule involve sorting through a line of cases, like the age of competency cases, as the rule developed chronologically, and seeing what each court did, what it said it did, and what issues were left undecided in prior precedents. Most cases ambiguous enough to be law review problems involve differing lines of analysis from courts of different jurisdiction, so there is room in the analysis for a few lines about which courts are more persuasive. Finally, the problems are likely to involve at least a few simple policy considerations, like the demands of a market system consideration we looked at in the age of contracting cases.

The first rule of succeeding at the writing competition is Just do it. Someone ahead of Persistence told her the writing competition was really important in the selection process. "Otherwise," Persistence confided, "I would have thought it was out of reach." Instead, Persistence thought, "I'd try really hard." Someone else told her that "Blue Booking" was really important, so Persistence devoted a large percentage of her time and effort being sure her entry was properly cited. As we will see, putting all the references to authorities in the very stylized format required by the Blue Book of Uniform Citation also plays a role in writing on.

Since law reviews seem to put such a premium on it, let us take a moment to acquaint ourselves with the Blue Book, although that is a skill you will learn in your legal writing course, so I'm not going to go into any detail here. The Blue Book is a manual of style published by a consortium of prestigious law schools. As the title indicates, its ostensible purpose is to ensure that the forms of reference in legal scholarship are uniform. In theory, this enables the reader to find references from any law review article easily, once she masters the basic system. Here's the way you might alert your reader to the source and meaning of the references you're relying on. If you want to cite Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, perhaps the most famous Supreme Court decision of the twentieth century, you would think you'd just write: "Brown versus the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, Supreme Court, 1954." But you would be wrong. The Blue Book tells us that the proper way to cite to Brown is as follows: Brown v. Board of Education 347 U.S.
483 (1954). And so on. There are 365 pages in the Blue Book, which tell you how to refer to every imaginable legal document and many nonlegal documents. Cases, statutes, law review articles, administrative regulations-all have special names and forms in the Blue Book.

Putting your writing into Blue Book form is like translating it into another language. Every time you refer to something, you have to locate its proper form in the Blue Book and conform your reference to it. To make matters worse, the University of Chicago, disgusted with the clumsiness and artificiality of the Blue Book, published some years ago the Maroon Book (maroon is the University of Chicago's school color), which sets forth a simplified citation system, and some law reviews now prefer Maroon Book style.

You may wonder why the law reviews, gatekeepers to the clerkships, etc:, of the high-flying legal world, would care whether someone said 347 U.S. 483 (1954), or 74 S. Ct. 686, or 354 US. 543 and so on every time she referred to Brown. Someone told Persistence that the problem was that the writing contest included so many more cases than the students could really use that it was hard to judge the entries. With Blue Booking, however, "you either did it correctly or you did not." If this were the criterion, the law review might as well run a footrace as a writing contest (you either cross the finish line first or you do not), but, as Persistence hastened to add, proper Blue Booking "also shows attention to detail and that you finished your writing enough in advance." In selecting participants in a publishing venture, these are not trivial matters. Pay attention to detail and finish your writing in advance.

When pressed to share her writing secrets, Persistence told a telling story from her experience in public relations. She had a good and attentive legal writing teacher, she said, but also she was willing to bend, to do what her legal writing teacher was asking, rather than "getting mad because of what they said about your writing." In addition to the ordinary skills of good writing-using topic sentences to introduce your content, sticking to short paragraphs, and the like-Persistence treated legal writing as a "house style," just like the styles for different businesses she had to learn in her public relations job. So when your first-year legal writing teacher corrects your college style and tries to teach you law school "house style," don't get mad. Get on law review.

How to Succeed in Writing On

In examining why a low percentage of its minority students winds up on one of the many journals at Georgetown law school, administrators learned that a large number of them didn't try out. An administrator at McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento speculated that their law reviews might be overwhelmingly male, because the women who are eligible choose not to serve, preferring to make money at a part-time job or do other personal things. Also, remember Claude Steele and the "stereotype threat" that makes people defeat themselves because they lack self-confidence? Don't do that. Do what Persistence did. Or you could do what Risk did.

After Risk learned that she had achieved only a mediocre average her first year, she knew that the law review judges wouldn't even read her writing sample in the grade-based competition, so she didn't waste her time on the competition. Instead, cannily advised by one of her female professors, she decided to devote the summer after her first year to finding a topic of her own to write about in the later, write-on competition.

Student notes are most often about very constrained subjects, so the student with only one year of legal training can master them in a limited time and express them in a limited space. A good self-selected topic usually involves a question of law on which the federal courts of appeals are split. Splits occur because there are twelve federal appeals courts, each with jurisdiction over several states or the District of Columbia. Like the different state courts, the different federal circuits are not bound by each other's rulings, so one circuit may decide a legal issue one way and another a different way. Unlike the different states, the United States is ultimately one nation, so the Supreme Court regards these splits as undesirable and will usually take a case to resolve the split and impose a uniform nationwide rule.

As of this writing, the circuits are split, for example, on the subject of whether the interest on accounts lawyers hold for their clients for various brief periods of time (called lawyer "trust accounts") can be allocated by the bar association into a fund for legal services to the needy. Challengers argued that the clients have a constitutionally protected property interest in the interest on the accounts, which the bar associations can't take. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that the state bar programs are an unconstitutional taking, but the First and Eleventh Circuits upheld similar programs. The Supreme Court correctly dislikes having clients in the Fifth Circuit's Texas keeping the interest on their accounts while clients in the First Circuit's Massachusetts are supporting legal services with their money, so a timely student note that addressed this split would be focused on a subject likely to be of national import. Indeed, the Supreme Court has now exercised its discretionary review power over this case presumably to resolve the split.

In addition to its import, the student writing on a circuit split can focus on the issue dividing the courts and use the courts' conflicting analyses, adding only a narrow argument for why to choose one outcome over the other, rather than having to do a sweeping amount of original research. All you have to do is anticipate what the Supreme Court will do, an exercise most of the first year is devoted to teaching you how to address.

United States Law Week, a publication of West Publishing, the same people who bring you the commercial versions of the court reporters, contains short summaries of noteworthy decisions that come out every week. Since a circuit split is usually noteworthy, an efficient way to find a good topic is to read the United States Law Week every week, watching for splits on interesting subjects. This is what Risk did, all summer. As it turned out, she didn't see anything that interested her, so she took a second good route to finding a voluntary note-she got an idea from a professor she was working for, for a topic involving a sex tort case.

Over the summer, Risk called the relevant editor from the editorial board in the third-year class and told him she was interested in writing for the law review. There were six spots left, and twenty-six people originally started down the process, but she "knew it would drop." (In the end, thirteen voluntary pieces were turned in.) After strategizing with her professor, Risk stopped interviewing for jobs for the summer after her second year, as she reported it, went to "no" classes, and "devoted herself" to law review. Note the risks involved here: She had a little less than one chance in four of making it at the beginning and she was risking having no summer job. Moreover, she was willing to use feminist theory to make a case in her piece for an outcome favoring the almost inevitably female plaintiff, an approach that she had heard "was death at her school." All in the interests of her long term resume.

Risk was shamelessly willing to cozy up to the white men in power. Two of the six white men on the executive board of the law review lived nearby, so she "went over and hung out with them and chitchatted with them, which ended up paying off" even more later, as we will see.

Sometimes white men can be really good friends. The editor Risk called in D.C. turned out to be an incredible mentor to her, forward-looking politically, believing in her. When the law review asked the marginal "write on" candidates to do voluntary grunt work, checking sources in existing articles and making sure they were in the correct (Blue Book!) format (called "source and cite"), Risk's mentor advised her to do it, even though it took more time from her classes, interviews, and, most important, working on her own article. The white male editorial board took this, she later learned, as evidence that she was willing to work incredibly hard.

"How did you get chosen?" I asked Risk again after I heard her whole story. "The editors could read the piece and understand that I was smart enough to be part of the club." When I pressed her, she said, "I knew from grad school [Risk has a master's degree] how to write a piece when I have long enough to think about it."

It turns out that you don't need a master's to master the task of writing your piece, either. The year after the editors defeated the effort to open up Northwestern's law review to more minority candidates by emphasizing the writing over the first-year grades, a handful of editors, including the irrepressible Michele Landis, ran a mentoring program to encourage Northwestern's minority students to try to write on. At the end of the fall semester, six of the nine minority students Michele's group had mentored (and one from outside the program) succeeded in writing on to the Northwestern law review, more minority members than in the previous ten years altogether. Just in case you think this stuff can't be learned, Michele's group got it down to a science. Here's what Michele's group did.

MICHELE LANDIS'S WAY

First, they called a meeting of all the minority second-year students interested in writing on to law review. They all went to a "fancy restaurant" off campus, thereby kicking off the process by showing the minority students that they deserved to be well treated. (Remember "stereotype threat"?) Michele asked the students to describe what they wanted to write about, why they wanted to be on law review, and how their topic was something that a white male would be unlikely to pursue, thereby allowing them to realize how important it was for them to penetrate the law review not just for their career ambitions but also to change the institution.

Then, following the basic sociological literature about how networks succeed, they did the following things. Note that none of them involves getting a master's degree. Every single one of them is something you can now do for yourselves.

GET A BUDDY

Pair off with someone else who's also trying to write on to law review. We know where everyone else is going at it alone in the war-of-all-against-all image that law school presents, the smart strategy is actually cooperation. Michele encouraged the students to pair off on the basis of similarity of topic, but that's not so important. What's important is what they did for each other: They cut the work almost in half. They did each other's classwork, freeing each other up to work on their would- be articles. First one would go to class and take notes, copy them, and share them with the other, who was writing away. Then the second buddy would do the same. It only takes a minute to Xerox a week's worth of class notes and give them to the other buddy, but it frees her up from a week of classes. At the end, the group established an outline bank, so they didn't each have to make four outlines for all of their classes and could spend the time working on their articles.

GET A MENTOR

Michele asked the potential mentors to do three things: discuss prospective topics at the outset, meet along the way as the students developed the drafts, and read and comment on the drafts. When you pick a mentor, be sure to ask her or him to commit to doing these three tasks.

Faculty members are the most obvious mentors. Look for sympathetic faculty members. Northwestern had people around-visitors, nonacademic faculty like clinicians-who were willing to help Micheles group: Professor Mary Becker was visiting from Chicago, and she mentored a civil rights act project, which is her area of expertise; family clinic lawyer Bernadine Dohrn acted as a resource on a paper about female genital mutilation as a problem of family law.

Faculty are not the only source of mentorship. Do you know any successful alums of your law school? Some of the Latino students at Northwestern linked up with a very successful Latina woman alum, still bitter years later about her lack of access to Northwestern Law Review, but, most important, happy to help other Latino students make up for it.

Law review itself may hold some mentors for you, as it did for Risk. Are there any sympathetic editors, particularly people who wrote their own way on, who will help? The year after Risk wrote on, she came to Northwestern and spoke to Micheles group about how to succeed in writing on, and some of the students even adopted her as their helper.

USE THE MENTOR

Michele again: "Some people took advantage of the process and met with a mentor every week and they were the ones who made it. Those who didn't, didn't make it." Michele strongly encouraged the students to produce the drafts of their articles one week before the competition closed, so that she and the faculty mentor could subject it to an edit before it was turned in. Among other things, the mentors told the contestants "who to avoid and who to suck up to." This political advice is perhaps the most important product of networking-finding out where the bodies are buried.

PICK A SUITABLE TOPIC

Topics are critical. If you want to increase your chances of getting on, get together with the other women trying to write on and try not to write on the same topics. Also, try not to take opposite sides of the same topic, so the editors won't use that to eliminate one of you as making the law review look silly. Get together with a group and get feedback about your topic.

Just like the secrets of the LSAT and the "Ten Commandments of First-Year Exam Taking," there are secrets as to what a successful student note looks like. You actually can see what the current editors wrote when they were staffers, because their student notes should be published by the time they begin serving as editors. After all, they're the ones who are going to be judging you! You obviously can't write the same topic, but you can pick a topic with a similar structure. If they wrote about a tiny proposed change in the tax code, you can write about a tiny proposed change in the occupational health and safety code, using the same materials of legislative history they used; if they wrote about the split in the circuits over whether taking interest on trust accounts for legal services is constitutional, you can write about the split in the circuits over whether zoning regulations for beach access is an unconstitutional taking or whatever is current.

Pick a narrow topic. You don't know much after only one year of law school. This is not the moment to propose a revision of the entire criminal law to substitute monetary penalties for jail sentences in a sweeping libertarian revision of all Western jurisprudence. Risk's note analyzing the state decisions about a procedural aspect of sex torts is a good example of a narrow topic, especially since, mercifully, there weren't fifty state decisions on the subject.

Law practice often generates nice narrow topics. I wrote my first law review article about an issue that had arisen in my practice, before I went into teaching-whether an action to enforce a contract mandated by federal law belongs in federal court or state court. This may not sound like a world-altering subject to you, but as I made my way to the United States Supreme Court with it (I lost), it was all-consuming in my eyes. More important, it was manageable. There were only a handful of cases on the subject, and a few things that applied by analogy. For her student note, Persistence was directed to an intellectual property lawyer who had just gotten a decision in a case of his from the famed legal academic and appeals court judge Richard Posner. As he is notorious for doing, Posner generated what some people would consider a completely new doctrine for the occasion. Presto! If it's not a circuit split, it's almost as good as one: all prior precedent on one side and Posner on the other. All Persistence had to do was analyze how the new Posner case could have been resolved under current doctrine, which she could get from the lawyer involved.

Pick a topic that hasn't been done to death. You have to check and see if someone else has already published something directly on your topic anyway (this is known as the dreaded "preemption"). Circuit splits, which are nationally visible in the pages of the U.S. Law Week, are likely to involve the danger of preemption. But many topics have that problem. One of Michele's group wanted to write about female genital mutilation. A glance at the computerized legal database, LEXIS, would tell you that there are a million articles on the immigration law aspect of that problem- mostly whether the practice entitles women from cultures that practice genital mutilation to refugee status in the United States. Most editors will not think you can add much to the existing wealth of analysis already published.

However, the existing writings did not exhaust the possibilities in the subject. There are large colonies of immigrants from such cultures already here. A good article would focus on whether such an act would amount to child abuse and neglect as a matter of family law or whether family law, as the immigration articles sometimes argue, should defer to claims of "cultural relativism."

You can find such a crossover approach by proposing a general subject matter to sympathetic teachers in several areas and see if they see what interests you as having a place in their area of expertise. I'm particularly high on looking at familial or criminal behavior through the lens of civil law these days. Some betrayed wife just sued the other woman for tort recently. I think there are real possibilities in treating adultery as a breach of contract. State law cases on the cutting edge in these areas would make a good note.

IF IT LOOKS LIKE A LAW REVIEW NOTE, IT IS A LAW REVIEW NOTE

Michele Landis says, "All first drafts of law review notes [whether from grade-selected staffers or would-be write-ons] look like papers for class." The editor's job is to put them into law review note form. If you want to succeed at writing on to law review, you will make your note for the competition look as much like a law review note as possible. It almost doesn't matter what you say, as long as it looks like a law review note.

Law review notes have the following characteristics. One, they are extremely redundant. First the writer tells you what she's going to tell you, then she tells you, then she tells you what she told you. So you have to know what you're going to say before you start to write. Second, the author gives the reader a clear diagram of the development of the legal doctrine being analyzed. So she usually starts with a statement of the subject in dispute, opens with a literature and precedent search (what's been said by others), makes an argument for why one approach is superior to the others, and discusses what will happen if the author's approach is used. Third, nothing, absolutely nothing, is said without a reference to some other authority. This both relieves the ignorant student author of responsibility for knowing anything and demonstrates her commitment to thorough research. Finally, the note is in impeccable Blue Book form.

If I were using law review note form for the paragraph you just read, it would look something like this:

Aspiring law review members want to know what the characteristics of law review notes are. In this paragraph, I'm going to analyze what the characteristics of a law review note1 are. Northwestern Law Review editor Michele Landis has said the characteristics of a successful law review note are: redundancy,2 road map,3 footnote heaviness,4 impeccable Blue Book form.5 Although there are a minority of law review editors who believe that law review notes should be an original effort to say something creative about a developing legal doctrine,6 very few of student notes of this sort ever see the light of day, much less get aspiring members onto the law review. So if you want your note to have the proper characteristics, you will be sure it's redundant, lays out a clear map to the topic, uses more footnotes than text, and is carefully conformed to the Blue Book.

I've given myself a pass on the perfect Blue Book form, but you get the idea. For some reason, this format is not natural to the English-speaking world. Accordingly, you cannot just turn your computer on and write a note in law review form for the competition. Like anything unnatural-ballet dancing, softball catching, cross- examining-writing a law review note takes practice and review. Write your note at least a week before it's due, check it to be sure it's redundant, clearly laid out, overly cited, and Blue Book perfect and then take it to your mentor to be sure you were right when you thought you were sure.

IF IT LOOKS LIKE A LAW REVIEW MEMBER, IT IS A LAW REVIEW MEMBER

Like Risk, Michele counseled her aspiring candidates to do the voluntary source and cite work when offered in the fall. Remember, they were helping each other with their classwork, so they could generate some extra time. The advantage of the source and cite work is that it made them look hardworking to the editors who were going to be judging them. When I told her my story about the big-firm associate who left his jacket over the chair while he sneaked home for a life, she roared. "Exactly," she said. "Looking hardworking is almost as important as doing the work."

JUST DO IT: FINISH THE ARTICLE

As one law review editor confided: "The most important thing is finishing. Law reviews are full of mediocre people who finished."

How to Succeed in Becoming a Hotshot Editor Your Third Year

Joel Klein didn't just make it onto the Harvard Law Review, he was articles editor. Here the pyramid steepens again. Of the thirty- some staff members chosen from the two hundred first-year students, only six become executive board members. Chicago's Instrumental reported that the jockeying for the next cut at the University of Chicago Law Review began within weeks after the people came back to their staff jobs the fall of their second year. When I first spoke to her, she contended that she wasn't going to be part of it, having had doubts about doing law review at all (before she saw how it transformed the interview process). But for those who are interested, they're hanging around the law review suite in the law school library elbowing one another to be the ones to carry the existing editors' coffee. Being able to sit in your carrel in the law review suite until the last editor has gone home is good practice for making it in the early years of firm politics, too. P.S. Ms. Instrumental was named co-editor of the law review. The year Risk wrote her way on to law review, all six big shots were white males. The next year Risk became one of three women on the executive board.

The selection process for editorial board is pretty typical: The staff members interested fill out a questionnaire regarding the things they've done and they each have an interview with the executive board and the people who stuck it out to become third- year editors. The editors included only two women Risk's year; as she put it, "It was a sea of white men with disembodied voices." Risk claims she was uncharacteristically nonstrategic at this stage of the process because it's all "so subjective." But she did note that her hard work to get on and her unflagging sense of humor in schmoozing the men on the board probably carried her a long way. As to the interview, she said, "They smell you, and if they don't smell fear they put their heads down and submit." Risk is the first write-on ever to have a position on the executive board better than managing editor, who is the one who pays the bills and turns out the lights.

Finally, Risk was doubtless assisted by the radical upward slope of her grades-the first semester of her second year, her grades rose to the top 15-20 percent. A lot of data confirm that women don't catch on as quickly as men to law school. Risk's story is a living lesson in why you do not have to take that toxic first year as the last word. Next year, she's going to hold one of the most sought-after fellowships in the country, having been chosen from thousands of students in a national competition. Although she says she's spent the last two years overcoming her first-year handicap, I fully expect to see Risk sitting on the opposite side of the courtroom from some Microsoft heavies someday.

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