Academic Legal Writing: Law Review Articles, Student Notes, and Seminar Papers

A good student article can get you a high grade, a good law review editorial board position, and a publication credit. These credentials can in turn help get you jobs, clerkships, and-if you're so inclined-teaching positions. The experience will hone your writing, which is probably a lawyer's most important skill. Likewise, a good article written while you're clerking or in your early years as a practicing lawyer can impress employers (academic and otherwise) and clients.

Your article may influence judges, lawyers, and legislators. Law is one of the few disciplines where second-year graduate students write (not just co-write) scholarly articles; and these articles are often taken seriously by others in the profession. Lawyers read them, scholars discuss them, and courts-including the U.S. Supreme Court-cite them. Occasionally, student articles and articles by young practicing lawyers have a huge impact.

Writing an article, whether as a law review note, as an independent study project, or as a side project in your first years in practice, is also one of the hardest things you will do. Your pre-law-school writing experience and your first-year writing class will help prepare you for it, but only partly. It's not easy to create an original scholarly work that contributes to our understanding of the law.

Seminar papers tend to be less ambitious and less time-consuming, partly because they don't have to be publishable. But they too help improve your writing-and if you invest enough effort into writing them, you can then easily make them publishable, even if publication isn't a seminar requirement.

This text gives some advice, based on the author's own writing experience and discussions with others.