Law Review and Other Co-curricular Programs

Being fully committed to providing the best possible educational opportunities for every student, law schools offer co-curricular programs, like law journals and moot court. Then, quite naturally, they let hardly anyone participate in them.

The most elitist organization is the law review, which is generally restricted to the top ten percent of the class. These students are given this special honor so that employers will not overlook them just because they are at the top of their class. Law review editors spend their time doing meaningful educational tasks like checking the citation form of articles they don't understand. Law review editors are the big snots around the school.


However, law review editors may be the biggest dupes of all. Consider this passage from a well known American novel:

Saturday morning was come and the summer world was bright and fresh, and brimming with life. There was a song in every heart; and if the heart was young the music issued at the lips. There was cheer in every face and a spring in every step. The locust trees were in bloom and the fragrance of the blossoms filled the air. Cardiff Hill, beyond the village and above it, was green with vegetation; and it lay just far enough away to seem a Delectable Land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting.

Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow and existence nothing but a burden. Sighing he dipped his brush and passed it along the topmost plank; repeated the operation; did it again; compared the insignificant whitewashed streak with the far-reaching continent of un-whitewashed fence, and sat down on a tree-box, discouraged.

You know the story. Through a brilliant use of reverse psychology, Tom Sawyer was able to hoodwink his gullible friends into thinking that it was actually a privilege to whitewash the fence. They did all the work for nothing; in fact, they even paid him for the privilege.

The modern analogue to Tom's whitewash is, of course, law review. Law schools want to have law reviews. However, hiring people to write edit, and cite-check is expensive. Under standard university wage scales, buying one hundred hours of this kind of skilled labor can cost nearly one hundred dollars. So law schools get students to do it for free, and they even get some of the best students to do it. All they have to do is limit the opportunity to the top students, and busy law students line up like Tom Sawyer's friends, begging for the opportunity to spend countless grueling unpaid hours working on the law review.

Law students, however, are not the only ones hoodwinked: law professors across the country spend much of their professional lives slaving away on articles that they will publish. "It's an honor," their deans tell them. "A privilege; you're lucky that the law reviews don't charge you money for publishing your articles." Then the deans secretly call each other on the telephone and laugh until the tears stream down their faces.

The law review experience begins with the selection process. Membership is determined by exam grades, based on the theory that short-term memory is clearly the best measure of student intelligence. A few students are given permission to write on to law review, in a grudging admission that writing ability might possibly somehow someday have some tangential relevance to editing. So write-on students spend all their waking hours for weeks or months writing and editing an article in order to have the privilege of doing more writing and editing. Write-on com-petitions have therefore been compared to a pie-eating contest in which the first prize is another pie.

In any event, law review membership develops extremely valuable legal skills. For example, students become intimately familiar with the Blue book. This is a definite benefit, assuming that you consider it a benefit to have an intimate familiarity with mass psychosis. Law review editors also, by definition, edit. The brightest person on the law review is given the position of Split Infinitive Editor.

But not all of the law review experience is blue booking and editing. Law review members are also expected to write notes and comments. These pieces typically have strict page limitations, mostly because there are limits on how big of a fool one can make of oneself in fifteen pages. However, some people seem to have a special talent for overcoming even this obstacle. This is the reason that notes and comments used to be anonymous. Anonymity of authorship could be an advantage for professors, too, as the Robert Bork hearings showed.

Law review editors also get to evaluate articles written by law professors. Of course, these articles are not about the LAW. Nowadays law professors consider articles about legal doctrine to be pedestrian. An article like that might actually make a real difference in someone's life, and law professors have no time for pursuits as mundane as that. They are too busy writing articles about meta-law: the philosophical, political, sociological, and linguistic aspects of law.

For example, some law review articles deal with law and social science. These articles are based on sociological studies that show, for example, that business people usually do not pay the slightest attention to contract law and that the only people in the entire world who have any idea of contract law are first-year law students. Another study shows that medical malpractice reforms have made no measurable difference in liability insurance costs. Naturally, people who have devoted their entire lives to these subjects find these studies distressing, to say the least. So unless you like having enemies, it is better not to burst their theoretical bubbles by revealing the law's (lack of) impact in the real world.

Learn the 10 Factors That Matter to Big Firms More Than Where You Went to Law School

If law review makes you work your brain to the bone, you should expect the camaraderie and friendship on law review to make up for it. Unfortunately, the only positive thing one can say about being with other law review members is that it is more fun than being with the faculty. Of course, lots of things meet that standard, including going down to the gas station and jumping on the ding hose. However, the prospect of being part of a close community of bright and dedicated young scholars does have some romantic Utopian appeal. Regrettably, when you get on the law review you learn that it is about as communitarian as the United States Marine Corps. The only reason that some law reviews have dispensed with cattle prods and flogging is that state law schools are subject to the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the Eighth Amendment. However, the Federalist Society is currently working on that problem.

Some law schools have law journals in addition to the law review. These journals usually focus on a specific area of the law, and have names like The Journal of Comparative Funeral Law, or The Review of International Agreements Governing Intestinal Tapeworms {Northern Hemisphere). They concentrate in a particular area so that they don't have to be named The Second-String Law Review, which they would consider somewhat demeaning.

Another type of co-curricular program is upper-level moot court. These students are the ones with bared fangs and fire in their eyes, who can't wait to get out of school and litigate the living corpuscles out of every warm-blooded creature. So they start doing it in law school. They learn the basic rules of advocacy, such as:

If the law is against you, hit the facts.

If the facts are against you, hit the law.

If the law and the facts are against you, hit the table.

They also get to go to competitions in distant places, like Eye-socket, Nevada. Compared to attending law school classes, this is pretty exciting.

There are also student organizations. Some of these ostensibly focus on a particular topic or interest, like "The Coalition for the Legal Empowerment of Undersea Protozoa," or "Future Trial Attorneys for the Clinically Brain Dead." However, they really exist only to provide resume padding. A student wants to be able to say that he is the Exalted Grand Excellent Potentate of the Ancient Royal Order of Backbenchers. This is supposed to impress employers.

Other student organizations, like legal fraternities, don't make any such pretense. They openly admit that they exist to advance people's careers. They put up posters showing that five of the sitting Supreme Court justices (a working majority) belong to Beta Grabba Fee. The posters also include testimonials from lawyers basically saying that it's who you know that counts, and that if they had not belonged to that particular fraternity, their careers would have been in the Dumpster. So give us your sixty bucks. These organizations perceive no need to have an independent reason for existing, since fear and greed can legitimately stand on their own.

Another organization, called the Federalist Society, has appeared at some American law schools. The Federalist Society essentially believes that things were a whole lot better in 1791 than they are today, and the sooner we return to that golden age when states were unencumbered by the Bill of Rights, the better. Their organizational efforts have been impeded, however, by the fact that Federalist membership dues must be paid in gold coins, since the society refuses to recognize paper money as legal tender.