Yet another reason why Lincoln's Inn is vastly superior to the Law Review.

Wait a minute, I'm a Harvard 2L - as a 1L, I went to a law review info session led by the current outgoing president. This whole account sounds kind of bogus to me.

Although it's pretty ridiculous if true. If nothing else, is creating a secret master list of 1Ls to target really a good use of anyone's time?

blah blah blah. who cares? anyone who wants in has to score in through the competition anyway. being "targeted" to compete doesn't affect your chances at "winning."

Impeach Crespo already

This type of practice is actually quite common at top law schools. In 2005, a series of editors on the California Law Review formed the "Committee to End Whiteness.". The "Committee" held meetings, to which only certain minority 1Ls were invited, in which it allegedly gave them information about the Write-On competition, and allegedly gave them cue words to use on the (in theory blindly graded) exam so that editors doing the grading could identify minority candidates. Not all editors participated in the committee (and some were very upset), but participation included several high-ranking (e.g., articles) editors.

This led at least some 1Ls to boycott the write-on competition, and as Boalt is a state school, several students considered (but I believe ultimately did not) bring an Equal Protection suit.

2:36: there is usually one "formal" tips session where a set script is followed -- that is totally distinct from the individualized, targeted, affirmative action-type recruiting program though.

OMG, Their job is to get a journal editted and published. Get that done without the petty (and outright absurd) bickering. This is the reason why a vast amount of lawyers are just miserable and useless people: fighting over potential and absurd conflicts that would and could never materialize and believing that their absurd hypothetical issues are worthy of anyone's time and attention.

Notably, a meeting is not "secret" simply because the individual seeking the meeting (apparently with good reason) does not want useless individuals involved.

Boston University Law Review also had an affirmative action policy. We were too busy drinking, however, to waste valuable time and drinking funds taking anyone out to lunch. Accordingly, the Law Review is just as homogenous as ever. Further, anyone who showed up to where we were sloshed could probably get a copy of the model answers to the writing competition if they bought enough shots.

The Law Review's recruitment program obviously sucks if there are still "groups that are underrepresented on the journal staff."

Holy crap, I'm glad I don't go to HLS and have to deal with this crap. The friends I have there describe a place where people pretend not to be competitive, but deep down are all gunning like crazy for clerkships. This is simply the product of that kind of environment. I'll take a Penn or a UVA over HLS, thank you.

Yet another reason, after my confirmation hearings, that I will NEVER hire a law review puke to clerk for me. Otherwise, *yawn.* Self-righteous individuals overly full of their own sense of self-importance

--ET

"A place where people pretend not to be competitive, but deep down are all gunning like crazy for clerkships"

=

YALE LAW SCHOOL

so an anonymous source of Lat's ideological ilk is selectively leaking one-sided (and undoubtedly subjective) information about the goings-on of Crespo and HLR?

Lat - you have now successfully become a partisan pseudo-journalistic flack. nice work.

Actually, opposition to the recruiting scheme was pretty bipartisan. I mean, when the president tries to forbid people from taking people out for lunch and talking about law review if they are not on a secret master list, it doesn't take a Scalia lover to become irritated.

Two good (female) friends of mine in my section were recruited this way, but I wasn't. They went to their coffees and asked how the recruiters got their names, and the recruiters told them a version of the truth (that they had been recommended by a professor). Obviously, my friends told the rest of our friends (including me) about it. My initial reaction was self-doubt. Did my professors not think I was smart? Did they not think I would make a good law review editor? These friends would have taken the competition regardless. Instead of increasing the confidence of female law students, all this policy does is make those of us who were not recruited doubt ourselves. Thank you, Andrew Crespo.

Here at Regent, he who prays loudest, or donates the most money to Pat Robertson, gets on law review. Its really the only fair way.

unrecruited woman, you are right to be upset, but you shouldn't feel bad about this. professors have a very skewed sense of who their best students are, since all they really see is who talks the most/loudest in class, and those people rarely end up being good editors.

Thus further confirming my decision not to go for Law Review during my time at HLS....what a bunch of tools.

Seems to me the bigger issue here is that at HLS and elsewhere, certain groups wind up "under-represented" because they fail to perform adequately on a blind-graded writing competition. I had thought the point of such competitions was to ensure the most capable and skilled persons were invited to the Review. I am most pleased to have attended a law school and served on a law review that didn't bother with this "minority recruitment" nonsense.

Crespo's obtaining the names of top women and minority students CAN have real implications for the competition, because Crespo is in charge of the discretionary committee which decides whom to give the seven or so slots that aren't determined strictly on the basis of the writing comp. Don't know whether he has access to the names at that stage, but he does have access to ethnicity and GPA, maybe even section rank

Highly unlikely that anyone on the California Law Review was giving away "keywords" to mention that would lead to extra points. Someone in those meetings would have told someone else who would have told someone else. The unethical behavior would have gotten out.

And that "Committee to End Whiteness," sadly, was real, but it would have been incredibly risky to give out secret write-on info when the group was already under scrutiny.

This letter is from the incoming EIC, dated 5/24/05

Dear CLR,

As you might have noticed, some members of the Boalt community have been
debating the merits of the outreach workshops that several members of CLR
have individually organized. Of course, I encourage debate and discussion
on this topic; I'm writing just to make sure you all know -- in response
to some questions I've received -- that these workshops weren't conducted
or sponsored by CLR, that they didn't use any CLR resources, and that they
provided no private CLR information.

All members of CLR are, of course, individually free to reach out to
anyone whom they want to encourage to enter the write-on competition, to
give 1Ls their personal advice and support, and to otherwise spread the
word about the benefits and responsibilities of CLR membership. The only
events that CLR as an organization conducted, however, were those on the
calendar that all CLR members and 1Ls received.

Just wanted to make sure that was clear to everyone.

[name redacted for privacy]

Can anyone confirm the allegation about the California Law Review (in 2:42's post)? That is shocking if true.

Oh ew. But really unsurprising given the fact that our country's pre-eminent legal journals are under the direct and ultimate supervision of people who've never had a day of real-world practical legal experience.

Law review types are, as a whole, disgusting and full of themselves. First-year grades are a crapshoot, and writing skill is determined by people with barely more experience than the writer. The arrogance displayed by people like Crespo, as though they have any CLUE what sort of person is a "quality student" simply by... I dunno... how much he hears about them raising their hands in class?

how about if we stopped pretending for a moment that the elephant in the room didn't exist, and instead questioned whether there *should* be "outreach programs" for underperforming women and minorities on a given school's "elite" journal?

or not. on second thought, it probably makes sense to give these coveted positions away to people who don't deserve them. carry on, sir.

Has it occurred to anyone that minority and female students are simply more likely to opt out of participating in this kind of (largely white and male) toolishness altogether? I think Crespo's just shooting himself in the foot.

open the black box of admissions criteria and watch the journal sink like a stone.

oh, wait.

2:57:

So true. I had classmates spend their entire winter breaks studying for first semester exams that had NO GRADES but credit/fail. The extent of undercover gunning at Yale can be both disturbing and hilarious.

Lat, about half of this post is blatantly untrue--and is going to unnecessarily make "unrecruited" 1Ls feel down on themselves, when they absolutely shouldn't. Check your sources next time before tanking people's confidence with biased rumors.

who are you kidding? this is 100% true. the secret spreadsheet, the attempt to control who is recruited, the significant break from previous years, etc.

4:33: Man, I'm glad to hear it. This post touched off a lot of "guess I'll go eat worms!" g-chats in my section.

4:33: if "about half of this post is blatantly untrue," care to share which part(s)?

What's stranger to me than the ax-grinding and untruth is the positive and non-anonymous coverage Lat gave his "tipster" in a post earlier this morning.

Not sure what all of this talk of "unilateral" control and authority is--another editor, elected to the "outreach" position, ran recruiting hand-in-hand with Crespo. Seems like the tipster has an axe to grind with Crespo.

3:32, if the non-discriminatory law review you served on was at Georgetown, you should know that it's adopted a diversity quota this year. Sorry- it's no longer non-discriminatory.

2:42 is lying. No one boycotted the write-on. There were no allegations of giving out "cue words." I never heard anything about a lawsuit. And there were white students at the sessions mentioned in the memo from the CLR EIC.

Same here 3:27.

4:53, the allegations are probably false, but if there were no such allegations to begin with, why does the CLR EIC letter reference questions about whether private information was given out? He/she apparently heard the allegations, even if you didn't.

5:36,

The letter from the CLR EIC references "private information," which presumably refers to details of the write-on problem. "Cue words" implies a conspiracy reaching from recruitment to grading. Given that submissions are read and assessed by numerous law review members, the conspiracy would have had a minimal effect unless practically the whole journal was in on it, making the notion that cue words were agreed to even more unlikely.

I think someone is just pissed he didn't make law review...

6:05,

It would seem like giving out private information or cue words would be equally unethical, although as you note the latter might be more successful in getting this self-appointed Committee its desired result. It sounds like the CLR EIC's letters confirms the existence of allegations of unethical conduct (the existence of the allegations being separate from their truth--personally, I don't think the fact that the EIC denied the allegations means anything either way).

I don't know what happened in 2005 at Boalt, but I went to the outreach clinic this year, and there is no secret information or code words passed around, just copies of a previous write-on case, which is available to all in the library. The point was more to explain the process and encourage minority students to try, than to get 'certain students' in. And yes, there were white people there.
I don't have a problem with targeted recruiting, since any member can talk about law review with their friend over lunch, but getting mad about 'unauthorized recruiting' is sketchy.

Does the Fed Soc still hold tip sessions on taking the HLR competition? They did a few years ago and this ensured that there would be at least a handful of true conservatives on law review. Apparently, there is not a single all-around conservative in the current class.

What's an "all-around conservative"?

Do you mean that he or she has to be fiscally conservative and not believe in evolution?

Yep, the Fed Soc still does it, and there's a sizable number of 2L Fed Soc editors, a most of whom would probably be comfortable with being called "all-around conservatives."

6:58

The Fed Soc was among the groups targeted for recruiting this year.

6:55: "Apparently, there is not a single all-around conservative in the current class."

Very untrue. There are several.

yeah there are a few conservatives in current class, but fewer than in previous years. 6:58: not sure what you mean by "targeted" but the Fed Soc tips session is organized entirely by the Fed Soc. that certainly is not part of the hlr's targeted recruiting.

I know a couple of solid conservatives on HLR. And I was targeted for recruitment (active in HLS Fed Soc). This "controversy" seems rather one-sided and trivial.

I'm not sure why anyone would need "cue words" to get minorities onto Boalt's Law Review - besides having a diversity editor who is tasked with increasing minority membership, as part of the write on, you must include a "personal statement" that counts for 20% of your score. Examples of past successful personal statements make the race and personal background of the candidate more than obvious, not to mention exactly who the person is if the "grader" has any knowledge at all of the applicant's personal history.

6:58, by "all-around conservative", I mean someone who takes a reliable conservative stance both on economic and social issues, and who also holds at least one or two positions that would be considered a bit to the right of the mainstream Republican Party. Not believing in evolution would qualify as such a position, as would, for example, wanting to bring back sodomy laws or believing that the income tax would be abolished.

The problem at HLS is that if you are, for example, pro-life and fiscally conservative, you would be considered a "conservative" even if you agree with the liberals on every other social issue besides abortion.

The "conservatives" in this year's HLR class would look like liberals by comparison to the conservatives from a few years ago. The conservatives I knew would have made Crespo's life so unbearable that the guy would have resigned by now.

"All-around conservatives" sound pretty scary. Perhaps they are all going to Chicago or Virginia now so they can be closer to the new $27 million Creation Museum just outside of Cincinnati.

Many current HLS students (including probably some HLR editors) hold the following beliefs: (1) churches should be legally compelled to perform homosexual marriages; (2) money should be drastically redistributed from the rich to the poor, even if that means that the rich should pay 80%+ of their income in taxes; (3) prisoners of war are entitled to the same constitutional rights as U.S. citizens; (4) any restrictions on immigration should be abolished; (5) the federal government should ban private religious schools.

Doesn't that sound scary? No one I consider as an "all-around conservative" holds views that are as far to the right as the aforementioned political positions are to the left.

Straw man much?

8:50, what is your point? I didn't say you hold these views, I meant that a significant minority (20% or more) of current HLS students. By contrast, I know only of a handful of current students who believe in intelligent design and support sodomy laws.

Believing that evolution never occurred, hating homosexuals, or wanting to abolish the income tax/destroy all safety nets in this country doesn't make you a conservative. It makes you a fucking ignorant moron. No so-called conservative at HLS or any other elite law school (including mine) would even pantomime that shit. Why has this discussion degenerated into a Sean Hannity-style discourse of liberal vs. conservative. The Federalist Society is better than the crap 8:45 is spewing.

"The Federalist Society is better than the crap 8:45 is spewing."

Sure, keep telling yourself that.

9:32, but what about all the extreme left-wing positions that I mentioned? Do they make one a liberal or a "fucking ignorant moron"?

For the record, I agree that hating homosexuals is not acceptable, even within conservative circles, but even the conservatives I know who support criminalizing sodomy do not hate homosexuals.

Fed Soc - your characterizations of liberal arguments are absurd, though strangely worthy of a Sean Hannity commendation.

a) not one legal or other argument for gay marriage has ANYTHING to do with compelling churches to sanction gay marriage or any other type of marriage. the legal argument for gay marriage rests on LEGAL and STATE recognition, not faith-based recognition. you intentionally manipulated this
b) not sure what this means. i think the first clause would find adherents, but not the second. finland has one of the most robust welfare states in the world with dramatic income redistribution and income tax rates top out ~ 50%.
c) yes; and i'm not sure what's so radical about that.
d) absurd. not even worth debating your characterization
e) even more absurd. find me one person who believes that. the most ardent ACLU-style libertarian would be diametrically opposed to such a thing.

I can't wait to hear what Fed Soc comes up with next. It's the only thing that's keeping me going tonight.

7:53, I read (on Nuts and Boalts, I think) that the Cal Law Review's fascination with increasing diversity at the expense of merit has devalued CLR membership in clerkship applications, leading top students (including SCOTUS clerks) at Boalt to skip the write-on competition. Law firms don't know any better, but according to that blog Boalt professors call judges for good candidates who avoided law review to explain Boalt's odd write-on system.

Funny how you cite Hannity as the typical arch-conservative. The fact is that Hannity happens to be a patriot who is conservative on economic and foreign policy issues, but he is no social conservative. Some time ago, he had a Catholic priest on his show, and he treated the priest as less than dirt for disagreeing with him on the desirability of contraception. Believe it or not, but Hannity literally yelled insults at the priest just as much as any liberal would have.

But your argumentation follows the typical left-wing approach of simultaneously exaggerating the other side's conservatism while denying the extremism from your side. Of course the mainstream argument in favor of homosexual marriage does not say that churches should be required to perform such marriages. My point is that a significant minority of homosexual-marriage proponents also believe that churches should eventually be required to recognize their idea of marriage. You should check out Democratic Underground one of these days to see the true nature of the people you associate with.

Fed Soc: thanks, I was really needing a boost! Would you mind sharing some of your thoughts on other topics with us?

For the record, two of the last three Supreme Court clerks from Boalt were editors of CLR. Apparently the judges aren't getting the message.

What "message?" 10:43 cited as authority anonymous comments on a right-leaning student blog made by someone asserting to know how federal judges as a whole view Boalt's law review.

I've heard the same thing about Boalt and clerkship hiring. I think the issue though is not necessarily the focus on diversity, but the fact that in the write-on competition for CLR, Boalt may be the only law review in the country where a) there is zero input from professors and b) grades are absolutely irrelevant. As a result, plenty of talented people get missed because student graders don't know what they are doing. Whether that is part of an effort to boost diversity or simply Boalt historic de-emphasis of grades and competition, I'm not sure.

As a result, whereas on otherwise-top student from a top law school might raise some eyebrows in the clerkship hiring process if he's not on law review, for the judges looking at a Boaltie who know about the process (mostly the 9th and a few SCOTUS Justices), they just chalk up a lack of law review to the stupidity of the current editors. For those judges who don't know or don't care, the Boaltie gets fucked.

The "2 out of 3" thing is the number that proves the point. The Boaltie starting at One First this next term, Ted Gluth, wasn't on CLR. When was the last time an NYU, Columbia, or Stanford grad landed on the High Court with no law review experience?

All of this LR bullshit wouldn't happen if we didn't have AA in admissions.

We lie to ourselves and say that we are not admitting less-qualified and less-intelligent people based on certain skin colors. We say we are creating "diversity" and then wonder why these people fail when evaluated solely on their merits.

If we were honest and could stop the lies that AA forces us to make, we wouldn't have the chicanery and intellectual dishonesty evidenced by all this crap.

PS- Fed Soc, you're an idiot

hls007 -

I assume you're talking about person glowingly referenced in this post?

http://www.abovethelaw.com/2007/06/clerks_october_term_2008.php

*Todd* Gluth.

Reality -- I love when liberals feel the need to cite "reality" to adopt a hardcore conservative position on affirmative action while remaining sympathetic to the most irrational left-wing arguments on every other issue. Conservatives tend to be skeptical of affirmative action, which fits coherently with their views on economic and social issues generally. But the question is, why do you hate affirmative action so much? Could it be, maybe (and I am not saying this is necessarily the case) your way of dealing with your personal animus for minorities?

Was EIC of LR at a lower-tiered school where a percentage of students graded on, a percentage wrote on, and a percentage got on because of a combination of grades/writing. The process was 100% blind. As a result, we had very few minorities (lots of women, though). Some people bitched, but, ultimately, membership on LR/journal was the only way to get an OCI interview. To broaden the criteria would unfairly deprive higher-ranked students from participating in OCI because there was no way the school was going to increase journal membership. Sure, it was a little disturbing, but it's a very sensitive issue if you're at a school where BIGLAW jobs/clerkships are few and far between and are almost entirely reliant on LR/journal membership.

2:23--Saying you had very few minorities "as a result" of a blind process implies that minorities can't succeed when the write-on is blind. That isn't what you meant, is it?

Regarding Mr. Gluth's SCOTUS clerkship,
It has little or nothing to do with the false notion judges and justices generally do not respect CLR. Many judges--including some feeder judges--don't value law review highly. Mr. Gluth's judge happens to be one who is particularly well-situated to assess Boalt students since he still teaches there. And I really doubt Justice Stevens buys into the line from the Boalt blog cited above that CLR is being devalued because its write-on process favors being a minority over "merit."

"The "2 out of 3" thing is the number that proves the point. The Boaltie starting at One First this next term, Ted Gluth, wasn't on CLR. When was the last time an NYU, Columbia, or Stanford grad landed on the High Court with no law review experience? "

Not sure, but if they finished number one in their class like Mr. Gluth, I'm sure they had more than a fighting chance.

4:52: I meant that very few students proportionally made LR/journals (about 10%). Minorities were a very small percentage of the student population and, thus, were a tiny population of the LR/journal membership. Poorly-drafted sentence - didn't mean to imply anything about URM's ability to write/grade on to journals.

In regards to the CLR write-on. First, no top ten law review involves professors in the selection of its members. Second, every top ten law review has a write-on process in which students grades are not taken into account. The difference between the way CLR conducts its admissions process and other major reviews is that, in addition to the write-on competition, some schools allow students to grade-on. For example, some schools reserve spots for all those who finish in the top-ten percent of their 1L class. Those students are automatically given a spot on the law review and can by-pass the write-on process. However, as I said before, these schools still have a write-on process in which grades are not taken into account whatsoever (i.e., Harvard, Chicago, Columbia, Yale, the list goes on).

CLR did have a process in which grades were taken into account. But in the 70s, the school student body, not CLR, voted to change the process. To reinstate this process would be very difficult today as 1Ls no longer take the same classes at the same time, in addition to the fact that students' elected courses vary.

In reality, however, reinstating grades likely wouldn't make that much of a difference in the membership, as people who generally do really well in their classes want to be on law review, and make it on. This is made evident by the fact that at least for the past two years the graduating student with the highest GPA were CLR members. And it seems that most of the people who made order of the coif since GPA has been taken out of the write-on, were CLR members as well.

Of course there are intelligent people who try out and don't make it on, but there is an impercise science to every type of admissions process. Why do some people who get into Yale, don't get into Harvard? Who knows, but you can't use those isolated incidences (or even a few incidences) to say that Harvard's admissions process is flawed.

Ditto to 3:07. Also as a minority CLR applicant who attended those workshops in 2005, I can tell you that there were no secret code words passed along, and honestly weren't all that helpful. And it seemed that those who attended were no more or less likely to succeed on the write-on than those who didn't attend.

Does any other law review in the country require the submission of a "personal statement"? How about asking you to mark a box indicating your race when you pick up the write on packet?

The #1 student in Boalt's class of 2006 was not a member of CLR (the EIC, who won the prize for top grades after 5 semesters at graduation, did not actually finish first after all grades were in). That person is currently clerking in the Ninth Circuit (so there is at least additional anectodal evidence that judges don't care all that much about law review if you are a complete and total badass when it comes to grades).

Basically, I think law reviews should have AA, and quotas, for myriad reasons (it's good experience, an important credential, improves discussions and decisionmaking, etc.). I also think the CLR write on process is dumb, not to mention unmeritocratic.

Anon:

In regards to your first statement, I think Michigan and Stanford require a personal statement, not completely sure, if you care enough you can research it yourself, I don't.

In regards to your second statement, the checking the race thing is kinda wierd, but I believe hearing that it was done for internal purposes (i.e., to see if a certain demongraphic tended to attempt the write-on, and/or make it on). I think it also asks what undergrad you went to for the same reasons (i.e., do people who went to Ivies tend to make it on?). Not sure really what the point of this is unless you plan to do targeted outreach to groups you feel aren't represented, which to my knowledge has never "officially" been done.

In regards to your third statement, good for him or her (although I question how you can verify this). But I'm pretty sure if you finish number one at any top ten law school judges don't care what journal you were on, or for that matter if have b.o., worship the sun, like to sleep with a teddy bear, etc. But that doesn't mean they don't value law review experience, it just means it's less relevant when you're well credentialed in other areas.

In regards to whether the competitions is dumb, can't really argue with that.

3:07--except, apparently, Harvard. The original point of this post by Lat was that the current Harvard leadership selected certain people for targeted recruitment, in part based on faculty recommendations. So faculty apparently do play a role at one top-10 school in LR selection.

1:37--who graduated first in the class at Boalt is generally common knowledge because students and faculty talk, and because people include their rank on resumes for clerkships/academic positions. Although I can't independently confirm 8:01's remark about Boalt 2006, it is true of Boalt 2005 (i.e., the person won the award did not graduate first). Why Boalt is unable to produce grades for graduates in a timely fashion permitting them to give the #1 award to the person who graduates #1 is a great mystery.

4:37, I suspect Boalt prefers to give out the #1 award at commencement which tends to occur immediately after finals. Therefore, it is not really possible for sixth semester grades to be a factor. Also, my impression is that people at Boalt generally don't talk about grades/class rank at all. It's just against the spirit of the place and students can't even know their class ranks unless they are applying for clerkships.