Although time consuming, law review is also rewarding. It is not a coincidence that many of those devoting much time to law review are simultaneously achieving the highest grades in their classes. The writing skills gained in editing your own work (and the work of law professors, if you become an editor) will aid you in countless ways throughout your legal career. Furthermore, having an article published and distributed throughout law schools nationwide produces a justifiable sense of accomplishment. For goal-oriented people who can see the light at the end of a long tunnel of hard work, law review can be a rewarding and invigorating challenge augmenting that posed by the law school curriculum.
However, it must be emphasized that law review is not for everyone. Many are simply not interested, dislike the regimentation and menial cite-checking aspects, and feel that their time would be better spent devoted to their other legal or personal interests. There is nothing wrong with the decision not to participate in law review and there are plenty of outstanding practitioners who never did. If law review is not for you, do not feel compelled to participate just because someone expects it of you, you feel you must, or because your father, mother, or great uncle did. It is an individual decision and only those who make it according to their own wishes will be able to derive from the law review experience all that it has to offer.
The quality of a school's law review reflects upon and affects the legal community's perception of the affiliated law school. If a law school's law review is a professional-quality publication presenting educational and interesting articles by eminent legal authorities, it reflects well on the law school itself and tends to improve the law school's reputation. Conversely, if a law review publishes thin, typo-laden, and sparsely footnoted texts comprised of work by inferior authors from little-known schools, the affiliated law school's reputation will suffer accordingly. If the members of law review, supposedly the cream of the student crop, cannot produce a good periodical, how good can the rest of the students and the faculty teaching them be? While this may be an oversimplification of the way in which a law school's law review affects its overall prestige, the axiom largely holds true.
There are pros and cons to law review participation. On the upside, law review participants hone their legal citation and research skills and often acquire immensely helpful writing and editing skills. They gain exposure to areas of law not taught in the law school curriculum and attain the prestige and distinction of being part of what most people consider to be their school's best legal journal.
On the downside, the law review participant must endure seemingly endless hours of burdensome cite-checking and rewriting article drafts, the loss of study time that could otherwise be used to improve the student's grade point average, and the loss of free time. Additionally, the participant may experience feelings of exhaustion, overwork, frustration, and even anger at law student superiors who, with complete license, ridicule, rewrite, and critique the participants treasured work product. Further, only a very few law students-or, for that matter, law review participants-ever make it to the coveted status of editor, that jewel that lights up a law student's resume like a Christmas tree ornament.
