Law Journal Worth It?

So I’m on a law journal this year. I don’t say that to brag. Trust me. Let’s just put it this way, a friend told me that it’s good I’m being the guinea pig so the rest of our friends can see what it’s like. I got the impression she said it because it takes up so much time. The fact is that it is a lot of work. I have a 2-credit hour class for it (should also have a 1-hour class, but I couldn’t fit it in), an article to submit by December, and a “pull” assignment* every ten days or so.

Did I mention it’s a lot of work? I probably forgot to mention that I complain about it at every opportunity, which was probably the inspiration for my friend’s comment. The thing is there is real value in it and in a lot of ways I really enjoy it. Seriously. If I only had more time to spend on it…

Learning the practice of scholarly writing and editing can be very valuable in many different ways. For one, you develop comprehensive research skills and are forced to delve deeply into a topic of interest, something you don’t often get to do in the hustle and bustle of the semester where it’s almost exclusively “find rule, apply rule.” Plus, the journal I’m on has a philosophical focus, so I’m using muscles I don’t normally use (and never really developed, frankly) to ask broad, open-ended questions like, “What is justice?” and “Why is the law the way it is?” (I don’t know the answers to those questions… so don’t ask.)

As with my post last week about whether law school was worth it, the question this week is whether law review/journal is worth it? Does “review” or “journal” make a difference? Is the resume polish it provides you really worth the time and headaches that come with it? Is there an evening student out there who really made it work well?

* Pull assignments come in two varieties, at least on the journal I’m on this year. The first kind is the “source pull” where you are literally pull sources by tracking down actual hard copies of sources cited by the author and, in some cases, finding sources that he should have cited but didn’t because hey it’s not like he’s an expert, right? The second kind is what I’m calling “bluesheet pulls.” Once your team (we’re divided into teams of 8 assigned to an Associate Editor) finds all the sources for an article, you you are each given a section of the article to edit. This includes a thorough copy edit and cite checking as well as filling out a bluesheet for each footnote (typically 8-12 notes per assignment). But it’s not like revising a paper you just wrote where you actually spend a little time writing the citations. No. Are you kidding? Sometimes it’s as if the author said, “I think it was in that book by that guy.” And for this one I’m doing now there are a ton of foreign language sources. You then photocopy the pertinent section of the source, staple it to the bluesheet that contains the correct footnote, assemble all your bluesheets, and put in master binder for the article. At least that’s how we do it.)