Why I'm Not Doing Law Review

A brief introduction for the uninformed. Every American law school hosts a student-edited academic journal called a law review. Rising second-year students are generally appointed to the law review through a combination of grades and performance in a year-end writing competition. Being named to the law review is considered the ultimate honor for a law student. The Harvard Law Review, naturally, is the most prestigious of them all. But they don't make it easy to get on.

Students who wish to participate in the law review competition must show up at a designated place during a two-hour window on the second day after exams to pick up their materials. Then, they have one week to subcite and edit a sample article (including source checking) and write a comment on a recent Supreme Court case. The reward for spending the penultimate week of May subciting and writing case commentary? Two more years of subciting and writing case commentary as a law review editor.

The Harvard Law Review offices are in a small white building on campus called Gannett House. You have no need to ever go into Gannett House unless you a member of Law Review. Editors must devote 3-5 hours of their time to subciting and editing and writing articles for 18 of 30 days each month, on top of their class work and interviews for jobs and any other social or extracurricular activities. Needless to say, it quickly becomes an all-encompassing commitment.

Well, I want no part of that ivory tower. I have no desire to stroke the egos of some of America's most brilliant legal scholars. I have no desire to slave away in the furtherance of academia. I have no desire to fake my way through writing my own scholarly contributions that I don't even get to put my name on. Why would I want to devote the next two years of my life to sulking my way through academic fantasyland in order to secure a certain credential when I can spend my time actually making a difference in the world by serving as a teaching assistant for first-year legal writing or representing indigent clients through a clinical program, which wouldn't even require me to seclude myself from the rest of my fellow plebians on the law school campus?

Anyhow, I picked up my competition packet today -- all 1,300 pages of it, including the inane rules specifying that each line may contain no more than 55 characters and the requirement that six photocopies be turned in with the original. I popped it open, took one look, and declared myself liberated from law review.

I've made it a personal rule that life is too short to be miserable, no matter what credential you might be able to secure. In college, I resigned as sports editor of the school newspaper because, besides the actual sportswriting, the work was too much of a drain and the editor-in-chief was a jerk. A year after graduating, I left my $54,000-per-year job with Capital One, even though I didn't have anything else lined up, because the job was frustrating and my boss was crazy. I think I ended up just fine. And you know what, I have never had a single regret about those choices I made. Not one.

So, the 1,300 page law review competition is destined for the recycling bin. I don't quite know what I'll be doing for the next week, and then the next two years, but I guarantee that I'll enjoy the alternative a lot more than I would law review.