Today, the annual journal competition opened. For the past couple of months, 1Ls have been told that joining a journal is Very Important™ and will decide your fate for the rest of your legal career. Don’t even think of applying to a clerkship if you weren’t on a journal, they would say. Journal is one of the most important resume fillers.
To that I say: maybe. It’s possible that joining a journal is essential to your after-law-school career. I mean, no one has ever mentioned it in an interview to me, but I’m sure it is something that they look at. Regardless, the messaging is all wrong. The question should not be whether a journal looks good on a resume, but whether the two years you spend on a journal will teach you anything that is pertinent to becoming a lawyer. After all, this is a law school.
One of the staid criticisms of law schools is that they are too academic and teach one how to become a law professor rather than a law practitioner. Law schools have attempted to remedy this deficiency by including experiential learning, such as moot courts, mock trials, and clinics — and, of course, our glorious Inns of Court program for professional development. Journal is also an experiential learning course. In my opinion, the benefits of journals on one’s legal development are oft overlooked. In fact, I would say that joining a journal is more consequential to becoming a good lawyer than mock trial or moot court.
For most parts of law school, the lessons of the instruction are obvious. Law school courses are supposed to teach you the law of a particular subject, and how to apply it to new factual contexts. Moot court trains students in appellate advocacy, and mock trial prepares students for trial. Clinics teach how to interact with clients and write emails (super important).
Journal teaches you one of the most important lessons of law school: the law is sometimes wrong. I don’t mean unjust or inequitable, I mean literally wrong. Judges write opinions that misquote previous opinions (Sunshine, n. 410). Scholars misunderstand previous works. Often this is done in the background sections of their articles, upon which their focus is less.
For example, Judge Pierre Leval of the Second Circuit once discovered that the Second Circuit had been applying the wrong standard (abuse of discretion) in derivative suit claims for over thirty years (Leval, 25). In my own work, I criticized several district courts for misinterpreting a Supreme Court precedent, because they failed to recognize the Court’s point. The reason: they didn’t read the cases that the Court cited. Had they done so, they would have realized their error (Samuels, 620–21). Finally, the members of the AIPLA QJ, through their work, realized that a judge had cited the wrong case for a quote (Sunshine, n. 410).
As a staff member on a journal, it will be your job to do what has been discouraged in most law schools: challenge those more advanced than you. In class, we are expected to take our professor’s word for gospel. It would be a strange class indeed if a professor gave an eloquent answer to an inquiry only to have it followed by a student asking, “says who?” But that is the most important part of legal scholarship and advocacy. Professors are wrong sometimes, dead wrong. They misread cases, have biases that inhibit their thinking, and even imagine post hoc justifications for their inconsistencies. They’re human. Which is why it is imperative to learn how to push back.
That’s where a journal comes in. While on the journal, you will be in charge of substantiating the articles that the journal publishes. You will be given responsibility for a certain number of footnotes, which you will check for truthfulness. The author makes a proposition. For that proposition, they cite an article, case, etc. You will determine whether the citation actually supports the proposition. The answer will be “no” more times than you expect.
As you will discover when performing any large-task legal scholarly writing, you need a whole heck-of-a-lot of citations. Each sentence will likely be based on something found in the law. It is all too easy to misread something, and misremember what was taught in class. Scholars and practitioners are no different. They do make mistakes, and it is up to students to catch them.
Which leads to the second benefit of journal: engaging with the text. Too often, we are expected to merely read the text of a case or article and understand what it teaches us. But not so often are we expected to engage with the text. To understand what it isn’t saying, its basis for what it is saying, and whether it is just a product of its time or still applicable today. Being able to recognize the limitations of the legal scholars that write these articles will allow you to develop the law correctly, rather than a blind adherence to incorrect law. It’s how a Supreme Court oralist can deftly sidestep adverse precedent and have the Supreme Court rule in their favor. It is actually reading the case and determining its meaning, rather than simply mining it for quotes. On journal, your job will be not just to read the article, but to engage with the article, to understand how it works and where it gets the law right and wrong.
Journal is a lot of work, especially if you later join the journal’s editorial board. But it is a course for which you get credit, and you can actually gain the skills necessary to really contribute to legal development. Journal is where the law ceases to be merely a trade and becomes a discipline.
Join journal not just because it may look good on a resume, but because you care about the law and want it to remain accurate and good. This is where it all starts. Hop aboard!
