The most intense commitment I have made at BC Law is still my decision to join the Boston College Law Review during the summer after my 1L year. Estimating conservatively, I have devoted more time to BCLR than to the other classes I have taken over the past four semesters… combined.

By the time I graduate in May, I’ll have been involved with the publication of seven books’ worth of legal scholarship authored by professors from all over the country. I’ll have received a total of eight academic credits for the work I’ve done since my 2L year. But today is probably the most exciting day of my entire time on BCLR.

My Note is finally published! 

I first started working on the idea that evolved into this Note on October 8, 2014 (I dug through my inbox to get the dates exactly right). Today, the date of publication, is February 1, 2016.* That’s 480 days! That timeframe spans four semesters! It has even been over a year since I put up my first Impact blog post about it.

Aside from the reward of finally seeing the end product of such a long period of work, being published in BCLR is truly humbling. The journal is in its fifty-seventh year of publication, and some of its published pieces have been downloaded over 15,000 times. The professors who publish in the journal are experts with national reputations and years, if not decades, of experience. To be a student with your name in print next to those of accomplished scholars like that… well, that’s why it takes 480 days to get published.

That’s also why today feels so awesome. It’s not just that I learned so much, and then wrote so much, about Jimi Hendrix, Marilyn Monroe, and the postmortem right of publicity. It’s that now, all that hard work is now officially a part of “legal scholarship.” 

*Today is also the one-year anniversary of the New England Patriots winning Super Bowl XLIX on this play. February 1 is a great day.  

Rob Rossi is a 3L at BC Law and a current member of the Boston College Law Review‘s Executive Board and the former Chair of the Law Students Association Social Media & Communications Committee. Feel free to contact him with questions about his experience, BC Law, or law school in general. Comment here or send him an e-mail at rossire@bc.edu, and don’t forget to follow the Boston College Law Students Association on Twitter @BCLSA.