The Dumbest Thing A Prospective Law Student Can Do

Aspiring law students will do the stupidest things to convince law schools to love them.

The phenomenon of undergraduate law reviews isn’t entirely new. We’ve broached the subject before, like here. But when a tipster sent a message from his alma mater’s message board soliciting eager-beaver undergrads to sign up to be staff editors for their new undergraduate law review, it’s time to offer a full-throated denouncement of this trend. Don’t start an undergraduate law review! And if one exists, don’t join it!

Normally, 0L advice in these pages falls on nonexistent ears, but anyone still in undergrad who fancies themselves on a law review probably already reads Above the Law, so there’s a chance we can save somebody.

Message to undergraduates: It’s not that we don’t care what you think about the law — though we don’t — it’s that there’s just nothing to be gained by making yourself a cite-checking monkey for law review articles that couldn’t pique the interest of one of the 753 actual law school reviews starved for content out there. Because make no mistake, no author is slaving away on a scholarly piece with the hope that it’s going to be picked up by a bunch of undergrads. They’d rather end up in the Thomas M. Cooley Journal of Who Gives A F**k than an undergrad journal. As our tipster acutely put it: “I mean, the value proposition of actual, real law reviews is already razor thin.”

And, yes, I said cite-checking monkey, because joining a journal isn’t about sharing your genius braindroppings about how much you want to be a constitutional lawyer, it’s about proving you can Bluebook. The editorial staff of a journal at any level is just there to make sure the much more important author appropriately crossed their “F”s and dotted their “J”s. And what’s the advantage of proving that you can perform a skill as an undergraduate that everyone in law school will be able to perform by the time law journals start bringing on 2L staff? If you answered anything but “nothing,” you shouldn’t breed.

Or at least an undergraduate editor should be a cite-checking monkey. Because if you’re at one of these undergraduate law journals that actually expects the editorial staff to provide the content, then you’re really at a law blog. A law blog run by non-lawyers. Jesus, you may as well be a commenter at ATL.

Maybe you think having some smart-sounding extracurricular on your résumé will appeal to law school admissions. Unfortunately, this is not college. Law school admissions don’t really care that much about being first alternate secretary of the Glee club. They care about your LSAT score and your GPA. On second thought, forget your GPA. You know what, let’s just cite Elie here because he wrote this while he was drunk, which is really the best time to take advice from him:

There is nothing you can do, extracurricular wise, that’s worth five extra points on the LSAT. If you think you can save the trees or cure cancer, then surely you can do those things *after* you get five more points on your LSAT.

To sharpen the point… it’s really all about the LSAT (assuming that there’s no longer anything he can really do about his GPA). Nobody does a prospective law student any favors by downplaying the importance of that test. And really if you can’t handle the pressure of the LSAT, you’re going to crumble during two days of the bar exam anyway.

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So please, to any proto-gunners working on the undergrad journals at Xavier, University of Washington, Penn, Columbia, Chicago, Yale, or the up-and-coming journal at UVA, just stop and go outside and enjoy your life. Or at least just devote the time to LSAT prep.

Well, maybe not at Yale. If you can convince someone you were on the Yale Law Journal without overtly lying, that’s probably worth it.

Earlier: Law School Application Advice, Given While Drunk After Watching The Olympics

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