Intellectual Life

Under Pressure: Law Review Edition

/ Courtney Ruggeri / Leave a comment

If you’re anything like me, you probably had a vague idea of what law review was prior to law school. As former Impact bloggers have discussed, there are ups and downs and benefits and drawbacks. Those bloggers have covered a lot of ground, so I won’t go into all that again here. Simply put, you should definitely do some research to determine if joining law review is right for you (reading those earlier posts is a good place to start!).

That being said, I knew I wanted to join BC’s Law Review for a number of reasons. I wanted to improve my writing skills, wished to keep the door open for potential clerkship opportunities, and hoped to go into the on-campus interview process with a strong resume. Plus, BC’s Law Review does not limit you to writing within a specific subject area and I am excited to delve into an area of the law that truly excites me next semester. To me, these benefits outweighed any potential drawbacks.

Although I still know that joining Law Review was the right decision for me and I have appreciated the opportunity to work alongside great editors and staff writers, there was one factor I never fully appreciated: the pressure that accompanies getting published. Don’t get me wrong: I knew it would be an invaluable opportunity to join the legal conversation this early on in my career. But what if I had an embarrassing typo or misunderstood the law?

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Law Faculty are Funny People, and Other Things I Didn’t See Coming

/ Dan Riley / Leave a comment

I didn’t necessarily think law school would be boring. I swear I didn’t. But then, I didn’t necessarily think it would be funny either. 

One of the natural barriers surely standing in the way of a law professor’s mission is what I have experienced as ‘the 1L jitters.’ Personally, I was very nervous about the start of law school, a new and defining chapter in my life. I was so nervous that I didn’t get much sleep for the first couple of days. Speaking with my fellow students, it’s pretty clear that I wasn’t the only one. 

Now, you don’t have to be a neuroscientist to know that getting at least a couple hours of sleep per night might be important for the learning process, so there was going to be a problem if we didn’t all release some of that 1L jitter-tension quickly. And that’s what laughter is, right? Releasing tension. I’ve found the class content lends itself to humor surprisingly well, and it’s where the professors can excel. 

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Personal Statement: You Control the Narrative

/ madelonabird / 1 Comment

I’m sure a lot of you are starting to think about your personal statements. I know it can be pretty overwhelming to decide on the right approach. My advice? Don’t forget that you decide your own story.

I was not a perfect applicant. I had strong grades and a strong LSAT, but my background was…complicated. When it came time to write my personal statement, I was stuck. Do I talk about my past? I had overcome a lot. But it wasn’t something I wanted to share. And it wasn’t how I wanted to define myself to an admissions committee.

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A Phone Call Solidified My Decision to Attend BC Law

/ Jaegun Lee / Leave a comment

Hi folks! Today, I’m pleased to host a guest post from 2L Tess Edwards, ’20, president of Boston College Law’s Environmental Law Society.

BC Law’s Environmental Law program has been a pillar of strength for the law school since its launching in 1972 by Professor Peter Donovan, shepherded in the years since 1981 by Professor Zygmunt Plater. Professor Plater, who was recently awarded the Svitlana Kravchenko Environmental Rights Award at the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference at the University of Oregon, is what we call a “big deal.” He argued a successful environmental case before the Supreme Court (and was reported to be the only appellate advocate ever to defeat a sitting Attorney-General of the United States in Supreme Court oral argument), led the legal response to the Exxon-Valdez oil spill disaster as chairman of the Alaska Oil Spill Commission’s Legal Task Force, consulted on the “Civil Action” Woburn toxic contamination case, and organized 20 student research projects used by the President’s Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. He involved students mercilessly in each of those projects.

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A Rare Bird I Never Thought I’d Be: 12 Years of Jesuit Education

/ Alex Bou-Rhodes / Leave a comment

As a freshman at Boston College High School, Boston’s all-boys Jesuit school nestled in Dorchester along the outer reaches of Boston harbor, I heard about vaunted “triple eagles,” guys who went to BC High, BC, and BC Law. It sounded like too much school, and I never understood the appeal. I certainly never thought I’d be one of them.

Although my father and his father had gone to a Jesuit high school in Barcelona, following suit was never on my horizon, and I wasn’t even aware of that legacy until I applied to BC High. I had never heard of the Jesuits, could count on my fingers the number of times I’d been to church, and was ambivalent about single-sex education. But my mother suggested applying, I did well enough on the entrance exam, and one day I found myself riding the commuter rail on my way into the city and my new school. Despite this somewhat thoughtless initiation (at least on my part; my mom knew what she was doing), entering the Jesuit tradition of education changed my life, giving me a sense of purpose that I didn’t know I needed and that is driving me through law school and into a career dedicated to public service.

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I Went Undercover on Law Review: Here’s What I Found

/ Alex Bou-Rhodes / 2 Comments

When I got to law school, the only thing I knew about law review was that Obama was Editor in Chief of the Harvard Law Review, and that sounded like a cool title. But I wanted to know more. So, a year and a half ago I decided to go undercover on BC’s Law Review. After toiling through the application process, getting accepted, and later sneaking my way onto the executive board, I’m finally able to publish my discoveries. Many of those I met and spoke with along the journey would only speak on background, but their accounts have been diligently verified by Impact‘s fact-checking team.

Law reviews (or journals; the terms can be used interchangeably) are the legal profession’s academic journals. They are the equivalent of medical or psychological journals for those respective fields, with a ranking system that is similar. Having your article published in Harvard Law Review is like having your study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Authors, usually law professors, submit articles to the editorial boards of journals, which select the articles that are published. The difference for law reviews is that the editorial staff is composed almost exclusively of students, although some law reviews are run by practicing attorneys, or “adults.” According to the rankings, there were at least 1,529 (1529 in “Bluebook,” the language spoken by law review editors) law reviews in publication in 2017. Many of these are housed at law schools, and some schools have multiple journals. BC had four journals until two years ago, when they were consolidated into BC Law Review (BCLR). BC also has an independent journal, the UCC Digest, but I leave it to someone else to go undercover and pierce their corporate veil.

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If It Takes Three Years To Get There: Preparing For The Bar

/ Alex Bou-Rhodes / Leave a comment

This is part of an ongoing series on preparing for the bar. Read others here and here.

The bar exam is coming. Us 3Ls will soon be propelled out of the lethargy that has come to characterize our final year at school by a terrifying variant of the Sunday-scaries. To help assuage any looming anxiety, we’ve gathered some details about the Massachusetts bar exam. To be clear, the following only applies to the Mass bar. After all, this is the only state where it’s acceptable to drink iced coffee when it’s below freezing outside; why would you want to be barred anywhere else.

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Preparing for Law School Series: Choosing the “Right” Classes

/ Courtney Ruggeri / 2 Comments

Course registration just began at BC, and we thought it would be helpful to dive into our next topic of the Preparing for Law School series—choosing the “right” classes. When your college doesn’t have a pre-law major or track, you might be feeling a little lost. And even if your school does offer guidance, you might be torn between taking classes that interest you and those that you think will look best on your transcript to an admissions committee.

Whether you’re planning for next semester or the years ahead, we hope you find our below insights helpful.

Brett

As a political science major, I spent four years saying I wasn’t going to law school. As a 1L, I’m probably more confused now than I was in August. (But at least I’m confused about the right things!) Keeping my less-than-stellar credentials in mind, my advice is to take the classes you want to take.  

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The Path to the Bar: Step 1, MPRE

/ Brendan McKinnon / 1 Comment

Last Spring, we published the first of a series of posts about the bar. That post talked about course selection with the bar in mind; you can read it here. Today we are looking at the MPRE, which is a first step on the path to passing the bar.

In most states, before you can sit for the bar, you must pass the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination (MPRE). It’s two hours long, and contains sixty multiple choice questions testing knowledge of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, which most states have adopted in some version. The MPRE does not test your personal ethics; it tests how well you know the Model Rules and how you apply them to factual hypotheticals. Continue reading →