Over the next few weeks, Boston College Law Review will begin its outreach and recruitment program to encourage 1Ls to consider applying to become a staff member next year. The annual journal information session will be held on Tuesday, April 9 on Zoom (details to be circulated nearer the time) and there will also be a range of other opportunities to speak to current staff members and learn more about the different journal opportunities at BC. With this in mind, I thought I’d write a post to share some of the main reasons I think 1Ls should consider joining law review.
The first thing I think it’s important to say is that no one must do law review. I repeat: no one must do law review. And no one should feel pressured to do law review if they’re not interested. If you genuinely don’t want to do law review, two years as a staff member will be an unhappy experience. I would be the first person to tell you not to apply if you definitely don’t want to do it. But I do feel strongly that no one should self-select out of applying because they think it’s not for them.
Everyone knows the discourse around the potential career benefits of joining law review. There are lots of other articles that discuss this and I intend to leave it to those authors to make their case. I just wanted to share some reasons why you might want to think about joining law review, building on previous posts on this blog in years past such as this and this.
- You get to shape the law
Law reviews are one of the places where we get to collectively imagine what the law can be, how it can function, and—perhaps most importantly—who it can benefit. Being a member of a law review gives you a direct role in contributing to legal scholarship and helping determine the future of the law.
Name me one other profession or area of academia that allows students to be so involved in shaping its future. This is an incredible thing and something that I believe students don’t think about enough when deciding whether to apply to join law review.
- You get to bring your unique perspectives with you
Leading on from my first point, you get to bring your unique perspectives to this work of shaping future iterations of the law. I am a neurodivergent person of color with a disability. I also have a public interest focus. Legal academia, and law reviews, have not traditionally involved people like me. That’s a simple fact. And this was one of the main reasons I decided to apply for law review and, eventually, run for Editor in Chief. If certain perspectives and experiences are not reflected in the membership of law reviews, they are often necessarily excluded from the scholarship they produce. Think about what perspectives you wish were centered or reflected in the law and scholarship you read. Could you help bring these perspectives as a member of a law review? If so, consider applying.
- You learn by doing
For me, nothing in law school has come close to matching the value of learning by doing. I didn’t know how to write a complaint or counsel clients, so I took part in a clinic and got first-hand experience of this. I wanted to learn more about appellate work so I sought out a 2L summer placement at an organization with a significant impact litigation practice.
And I wanted to really learn how to research and write, so I joined law review. Law review built on the foundation laid by the 1L Law Practice curriculum and boosted my substantive research and writing skills immeasurably. These skills are also directly transferable outside the world of academia and legal scholarship: they were unbelievably helpful in my 2L summer job, they will be integral when I clerk for a federal judge next year, and they will form a core part of my legal skills in my future career. The ability to write comprehensibly, cogently, and concisely about complex topics is perhaps one of the best skills a lawyer can learn. Law review has given me this experience in spades.
- You increase your substantive knowledge of the law
This year, I’ve edited articles about everything from the ways courts use fair market value as a proxy for just compensation in takings cases to the potential disjunctures existing between the Supreme Court’s Article II and major questions doctrine jurisprudence. I wrote my Comment on the particularity requirement as applied by courts when reviewing noncitizens’ applications for deportation relief. Did I know anything about these before joining law review? No. But I do now, and this will make me a much better lawyer when I leave law school.
The law is a living thing and doctrines in one area of the law interrelate with and build on doctrines in other areas. The mere act of grappling with different topics of the law, even if you do not have a full substantive grasp of a particular legal area, helps build skills that are essential in an ever-moving and quickly evolving profession. I will, therefore, be an infinitely better advocate for my future clients due to the literacy I now have across a wide range of areas of law. I came to law school wanting to learn everything I could to become the best possible future advocate for the causes and communities I care about. Joining law review has been a central part of this.
- The Note gives you an opportunity to make your mark
Staff writers spend the second half of their year researching and writing an original piece of legal scholarship on an area of their own choosing. This is a unique opportunity to spend a significant amount of time, and get academic credit for(!), doing a deep dive into one area of law.
As a staff writer, you get to use it as an opportunity to make your mark on the world of legal scholarship and perhaps bring attention to something that you feel is overlooked or misunderstood in the legal academy. I wrote my Note to argue for a national right to shelter for people experiencing homelessness, building on my passion for housing and homelessness issues and work prior to starting at law school.
Other Notes written by my class this academic year have included Notes examining the right to education, the third-party litigation funding market, the presumption of competency for execution for prisoners on death row, regulations governing the wine market in the U.S., and the potential for people who can become pregnant to assert a property interest in their uteruses as a bulwark against efforts to restrict reproductive freedoms.
Jonathan Bertulis-Fernandes is a third-year student at BC Law. Contact him at bertulij@bc.edu.
BC Law: Impact 