Law Schools

Yes, Law Students, You Should Really Try To Get Onto A Journal

Second only to GPA, journal membership is the most important part of your résumé when it comes to landing a legal job.

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You finally made it.  After all of the reading, highlighting, outlining, cold calling, studying, and stress, your last final exam is complete.  1L year is officially over.  Time to put away the Bluebook and celebrate, right?  But there’s this email that you put off reading until after exams.  Well, the party can wait for one last email, right?  Let’s see what we have here . . .

Wait, what?  More writing?  A completely new test for the wholly optional activity of serving on a journal?  This is a joke, right?  Do I need to do this?  If you find these, or similar, questions currently running through your head, then you have come to the right corner of the internet.

Should you try to get on a law journal, even if that means taking yet another writing test after exams are complete?  The short answer is, yes.  The longer answer is that maybe second only to GPA, journal membership is the most important part of your résumé when it comes to landing a legal job.

Granted, the work you do as a student on a journal can be relatively mundane.  As a 2L, the bulk of your time will be spent checking citations on articles set to be published, both to ensure they exist and that they are formatted correctly — the fundamental objections of Richard Posner notwithstanding.  The following year’s responsibilities can vary widely depending on your role, anywhere from helping to pick and edit student notes to running the publication for a year as Editor-in-Chief.  But the benefits of serving on a journal go well beyond the skills a student acquires during their time in the journal offices (which, often times, reside in windowless basements).

Employers want someone who can multitask. Anyone (well, perhaps not ANYONE) can get high grades in law school if there’s nothing else going on in their lives to serve as a distraction. Unfortunately, that is not how legal practice works. From the top of the Above the Law rankings (or Am Law 100, if you are fixated on profits per partner) to a solo practice, as an attorney, you will never have just one task in front of you.  A typical junior associate is trying to juggle the demands of a half dozen partners all of whom want their project completed first, to say nothing of the young attorney who has to concern themselves with their legal work in addition to paying for malpractice insurance and finding a way to keep the lights on.  Balancing your Fed Courts reading with managing the production of your journal’s Symposium is not the perfect analog to the rigors of legal practice, but it is a start and a signal to employers that you are willing to take on a number of tasks.

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The benefits of being on a journal are not just limited to private practice.  If you want to land a judicial clerkship — the utility of which will be the subject of a future column, but for now, I will simply say that you should, especially if you have a scintilla of interest in litigation — having served on a journal can be critical to both getting the position and excelling in it once you are in chambers.  Many judges, especially as you go up the federal judicial ladder, will not even evaluate your candidacy without a journal on your résumé.  And for many federal appellate judges, it could very well be law review or bust, an unfortunate state of affairs since, on some occasions, a law school’s “best” journal might not be its law review.

The near universal overlap between clerks and journal members can exist for many judges because clerks often need a relationship with the Bluebook that is more akin to a divinity student and their particular book of faith than any relationship which might be found in a typical legal writing class.  In addition, when on a journal, students are often immersed in an array of legal areas beyond what their school’s course offerings might provide and are familiar with cutting-edge legal scholarship, which can prove useful in chambers when drafting opinions and orders — though a subset of the judiciary, the size of which varies depending with whom you speak, often likes to pretend that law journals do not exist.  Journal participation can also provide students with an opportunity to develop their writing skills and produce a writing sample that differentiates itself from the 1L legal writing brief.  While this often takes the form of a note, there can be other avenues as well.  See, e.g., Book Annotations, 39 N.Y.U. J. Int’l L. & Pol. 729, 734-738 (2007) (reviewing Michael Doyle & Nicholas Sambanis, Making War and Building Peace: United Nations Peace Operations (2006)).

Yes, I know there are many things you would rather do to celebrate surviving the first year of law school than writing some more.

But taking part in a journal will not only bolster your law school experience, but will give you a decided advantage in all facets of the legal job market.  And for those of you who graded onto a journal, first round is on you.

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Nicholas Alexiou is the Director of LL.M. and Alumni Advising as well as the Associate Director of Career Services at Vanderbilt University Law School. He will, hopefully, respond to your emails at abovethelawcso@gmail.com.

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