People in law school always refer to “making law review” as some sort of honor or something to strive for. What is it exactly? Sounds kind of boring based on the title.
IANALS but my WAG would be that it refers to getting an article published in the Harvard Law Review.
A law review is a publication produced by most law schools that features articles by professors, students and various academics (judges and whatnot). It’s basically the legal equivalent of a scientific journal, but with less influence and no peer review. Law review articles are not binding upon courts in their decisions, but often serve as a resource for courts that are facing a particular issue.
Law reviews are usually run by senior law students at any given school. Most schools have a high GPA requirement to join law review…usually somewhere around 3.5 or so.
Basically, it’s a bunch of dorks producing a magazine about the law and current issues therein. But “making law review” is generally one of the highest academic achievements a law student can accomplish in law school.
Executive editors of law reviews are studs beyond compare. 
It is, in fact, incredibly boring, but it’s also incredibly prestigious. Unlike in any other profession I know of, academic journals in law are managed and edited almost exclusively by law students. That means that as a student, membership in the editorial board of a law review can be a remarkably influential position, for which competition is fierce - generally speaking, the more prestigious the journal, the fiercer the competition.
Each law review has its own admissions policies, but usually it comes down to a combination of first-year law grades and a writing competition. At my law school, NYU, most of the journals co-sponsored a writing competition so that students wouldn’t have to repeat the process several times over. That competition began on the day that the second-semester first-year exams ended. Over the summer, the rising third years on each cooperating journal would review the competition entries and grades, and then extend offers independently. Students with extraordinary grades and/or extraordinary writing skills would get several offers.
Second-year editorial board members’ duties amount mainly to two things: horrific grunt-work known as “cite-checking” (made easier by the Net, which only took hold after I graduated in 1994), which requires the member to check the location and, crucially, the substance of each citation in an author’s draft. The other half of a second-year’s duties is the writing of a Note. Law review articles come in two species: Articles, written by academics, judges, and other members of the profession, and Notes, somewhat briefer articles written by students. Writing a Note may not be an express requirement, but if you don’t write a Note you’ll generally have no chance of getting an influential editorial position as a third-year–and you may not get a third-year position at all. Only the best Notes get published.
If your Note is good, and usually if you’re willing to work hard, get along with people, and play good politics, you might become Editor of your journal. Editor of a prestigious law journal is, within the legal profession, more valuable in most cases than class rank. Top editors of the top law reviews generally are the only people eligible for the most prestigious judicial clerkships, such as for the Supreme Court and the top federal appellate courts. For example, a guy who babysat me when I was a kid managed to become Editor of the Stanford Law Review. After graduation, he clerked for two years for then-Chief Judge Abner Mikva of the U.S. Court of Appeal for the DC Circuit, generally considered primer inter pares among the federal appellate courts. During that clerkship he won a Fullbright to Oxford, after which he became a clerk for Justice O’Connor.
Even the less exalted editorial positions, such as Managing Editor, Associate Editor, Assistant Editor, etc., can lead to these kinds of jobs.
What are the most prestigious law journals? Generally speaking, the ones with the simplest names. At NYU, The New York Law Review was quite a bit more prestigious than The New York University Journal of International Law and Politics, although specialty journals like that one can be very helpful to people who know they want to specialize in the named field.
Some schools have “socially conscious” law reviews, operated with a more 60s mindset. For example, the New York University Review of Law & Social Change followed an open admissions policy. My take on that: “What’s the difference between hell and Social Change? To get into hell you have to do something.”
(Which wasn’t really fair on my part - Social Change did require people to turn in assignments, so entry was conditioned on actual work. Not a bad policy, really.)
I didn’t enter the law review competition at NYU–mainly because I really didn’t like the kind of academic writing the law reviews encouraged. I wasn’t interested in a clerkship, didn’t want to be an academic, and didn’t feel like writing a Note. So I applied for the Moot Court team instead, where entry was based solely on a writing competition. Other people chose to do clinics instead, where you actually meet with clients, help represent their cases, etc. - in other words, learn skills that actually are valuable to the usual practice of law.
Argh. That should’ve read, New York University Law Review.
No. Every law school publishes at least one scholarly journal (Georgetown Law has about 10 of them), whose title is often “X Law Review.” The journal publishes scholarly works by students, but also by actual legal scholars, practitioners, etc. The journals’ staffs, however, are entirely comprised of law students.
“Making” law review means being appointed to the editorial staff of the journal. It’s usually determined by your grades during first year. Some journals allow you to “write on” – that is they hold a writing competition and invite the authors of the best submissions to join the staff. It’s supposed to be a big plus on your resume.
Academic law journals may not be peer reviewed, but when I worked as an editorial assistant for The Business Lawyer, which is produced under the auspices of the Business Law Section of the ABA, it was certainly peer reviewed.
Doint that job is where I learned to read upside down and backwards. We also had to read galley proofs aloud and actual “speak” the punctuation. For example, "Initial capital “T” - The door comma is open period. Talk about mind numbing.
Let me guess…
Ah, yes, reading proofs aloud - that was another of the second-year’s tasks. But even by my time, we didn’t have to read upside-down and backwards.
BTW, I subscribed to TBL for years, which I thought was run by students at the Unversity of Maryland…ah, yes, here’s the info I was looking for:
Per their www.law.umaryland.edu/osa/osa_tbl.asp website. So I’m afraid it’s like all the other law reviews now.
The only law journal I know of that’s still truly peer-reviewed is the Tax Law Review, again at NYU.
I worked on The Business Lawyer during the editorship of George C. Freeman, Jr. (1988-89, IIRC). I was his legal assistant and the you can image the firms great joy at me working 60+ hours per week and having absolutely none of it be billable.
The peer review issue can vary from review to review. I worked on one in law school that didn’t have peer review, but I’ve since been asked by another law review to provide an “external assessment” of an article that had been submitted.
The assessement was double-blind. I didn’t know the author of the article (although actually I correctly guessed who the author was, from the topic and stylistic approach). The author got my comments but didn’t know who I was.