Law Schools

NYU Law School Students On Strike After Botched Write-On Competition Process

It looks like there might be a positive outcome here, but this is only the first step.

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A write-on competition is bad enough. Ramming forward with it right after a Zoom semester, in the midst of a pandemic that’s disproportionately impacting Black and Brown students, while the most recent police killings ignited long-overdue protest and a violent response from law enforcement, is downright foolhardy. On the other hand, if the goal was to performatively simulate the experience of working on a journal — sacrificing all connection with reality to obsess over comma placement — mission accomplished, I guess?

But obviously that shouldn’t be the experience of working on a journal and it definitely shouldn’t guide the process of awarding positions that offer significant career enhancement. Given the circumstances and the disproportionate impact on some students — students who already face systemic career obstacles — a request was lodged with the school to offer some accommodation. The response was a 48-hour extension and the opportunity to tack on a 150-word personal statement, presumably banking on America banging out a solution to the whole “police brutality and global pandemic” thing over the weekend.

The lackluster response prompted a June 8 letter written to the administration on behalf of Concerned Students and Alumni and in solidarity with NYU’s BALSA explaining that the accommodation was not, in fact, remotely enough and noting that a competition held under circumstances that sideline Black students “would allow inequitable access to Law Review by constructing additional barriers for Black students to clerkships, fellowships, networking, and the highest-paying legal careers. Further, journals need representation by Black students to ensure rigorous academic discourse and fight the whitewashing of legal academia; Black students deserve far more than the burden of tokenized representation.”

The school’s response to this was a whole lot of not much.

So the students wrote a follow up earlier this week pointing out that the University of Texas, facing the same challenges, already announced a second writing competition. With NYU having abdicated leadership on this issue, the students took the matter into their own hands and organized. Roughly 150 students have now signed this statement of solidarity:

Those of us who are currently on or will be offered membership on any of the journals pledge that we will refuse to perform any of our membership duties until the above demands are satisfied.

Specifically, the statement demands that the journals “expand their membership, making available additional membership slots to the Class of 2022. Additionally, we demand the reopening of the submission period to allow all students an equitable opportunity to apply for those additional slots.”

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Take a second to consider what this means. Getting 150 law students together to do anything is an accomplishment. Getting so many to put the most significant career chit of their nascent professional lives on the line requires impressive organizing. A lot of people don’t get the distinction between being an ally and being an accomplice when it comes to struggles for justice, but in a nutshell it’s easy to be an ally because allies aren’t risking anything. An accomplice, on the other hand, stands to go down with the cause and suffer some real consequences. It’s a testament to the effort that it succeeded in bridging this gap.

And yesterday morning, the Office of Student Affairs sent around a statement explaining that it will design a second writing competition, pledging to “communicate more details regarding the second competition, including which journals will participate, on Tuesday, July 14th.” It’s a safe bet that the Journal of Law & Liberty — the libertarian journal who sources say have remained markedly intransigent throughout the process — won’t be joining the second round. The leadership of that journal didn’t even sign the OSA statement, but maybe like “[their] very own Richard Epstein” they massively underestimated the numbers here.

The new competition won’t result in anyone already awarded a slot losing their position, which is nice, but also underscores how ridiculously easy this would have been to solve back in June if the school had wanted to do it. So while the school may be on the path toward resolving the immediate crisis — and one organizer cautioned that “there are a lot of ways that a second competition can replicate the issues of the first competition” — this shouldn’t put the underlying issue to rest. This isn’t really about writing on to journals as much as the failure of anyone in charge to recognize the problem in the first place and, once informed, offering little to no response. That’s the breakdown and what animates the organizing effort and that’s going to take a lot more than a second Bluebooking exercise to address — it’s going to require some fundamental reflection.

But it looks like there will be a sizable block of energized students prepared to push the school in this effort.

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HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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