How to Get on Law Review

Selection formulas vary by school, and this is one of the few places where the variation is genuinely decisive rather than cosmetic. You need to read your journal's published selection policy — most flagship reviews post it in the spring — instead of relying on what a 2L tells you.

The common structures are: (1) pure grade-on for a fixed number of slots plus a write-on for the rest; (2) a blended score, where your 1L GPA and your competition score are weighted (50/50 and 33/67 are both common); (3) pure write-on, where grades are not considered at all; and (4) a small discretionary or holistic pool evaluated on a personal statement. Some schools also run a unified competition where one packet feeds every journal on campus and you rank your preferences.

Two practical consequences. First, if your school blends grades and the competition, find out the weight before you decide how much effort to invest — a 1L with median grades at a 50/50 school needs a top-decile competition score, while at a pure write-on school grades are irrelevant. Second, if there is a grade-on cutoff, it is usually applied to spring-semester rank, which is often not released until after the competition opens. Assume you are writing on.

The packet drops within days of your last 1L exam and you get roughly five to ten days to complete it. You receive a closed universe of materials — a principal case or statute plus a curated set of cases, articles, and legislative history — and you are forbidden from doing outside research. Doing outside research is a disqualifying violation at many schools, not a stylistic error.

You will write a case comment, note, or bench memo, typically 8 to 12 double-spaced pages with a hard word or page limit, and you will complete a Bluebook editing exercise on a separate document riddled with citation errors. Grading is anonymous: you get a number, and any self-identifying detail in your file name, header, or text can void your submission. Follow the formatting instructions with paranoid literalism — margins, font, footnote style, file naming. Graders are 2Ls with a rubric and a hundred packets to read, and formatting violations are the cheapest possible deduction to take.

Plan the week backward from the deadline. Read the entire closed universe on day one before you write a word, spend day two picking and testing a thesis, draft on days three through five, and reserve the last full day for the Bluebook exercise and a clean proofread. Do not leave the editing exercise for the final night; it is mechanical, tedious, and the most reliably scored component.

The single most common failure is summarizing instead of arguing. Graders read dozens of packets that faithfully restate the majority and dissent and then conclude the court "should have balanced the interests more carefully." That scores at the median. A winning comment states a specific, contestable thesis in the first paragraph and then proves it using only the closed universe.

Pick a narrow thesis you can actually support with the materials you were given. "The court's reliance on the Second Circuit's foreseeability test is inconsistent with the statutory text it purports to construe, and the dissent's alternative fails for the same reason" is a thesis. "This case was wrongly decided" is not. Narrower theses win because you can support them exhaustively in ten pages, and because the closed universe was assembled with a few specific arguments latent in it — your job is partly to find what the packet drafters buried there.

A structure that consistently works:

Treat this as free points. It is objectively scored, the answers are in the book, and most applicants prepare for it least. Note that law review footnotes use the whitepages typeface conventions (large and small caps for books, periodical titles, and institutional authors), not the Bluepages conventions you learned for legal writing memos — this trips up almost everyone the first time.

Work through the exercise rule by rule rather than intuitively, and check each citation against the book even when it looks right. Confirm which edition your school uses, because rule numbering has shifted slightly across editions.

The recurring error categories are predictable:

Many journals include an optional statement, sometimes used to fill a small discretionary set of slots and sometimes used only as a tiebreaker. Where one exists, write it. It costs an hour and it is the only part of the packet where you are not a number.

Selection policies at several schools were revised after Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, 600 U.S. 181 (2023), and some journals have narrowed or restructured identity-based criteria while keeping statements that ask about experience, adversity, or what you would contribute to the journal. Read the current-year prompt rather than a prior year's, and answer the prompt actually asked.

Content that works: a concrete experience, what it taught you about reading or arguing, and why this journal specifically. Content that does not: generalized adversity narrative with no link to the work of editing and publishing scholarship.

Do not study for the competition during exams. Your grades may be half your score, and a 1L exam is a higher-return use of March and April than Bluebook drills. What you can do in advance is logistical: block the competition week on your calendar, tell family you are unavailable, cancel travel, and confirm you have a functioning laptop and a physical Bluebook.

In the 48 hours between your last exam and the packet, do two things. Skim the Bluebook's Rule 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 15, and 16, and read one or two published case comments or student notes from your target journal to internalize the form. Many journals also post a sample packet or a prior year's problem — do it timed if it exists.

Rest matters more than students expect. The competition arrives when you are depleted, and the packets that read as careless are usually written by people who started drafting at hour ten of a fourteen-hour day. Sleep, then write.

Take a secondary journal. Specialty journals — technology, environmental, international, health, civil rights — publish real scholarship, put journal membership on your resume, and let you publish a student note, which is the credential that actually matters for academic and appellate hiring. Employers outside a narrow band of clerkship and academia hiring rarely distinguish sharply among journals.

There are also second chances. Many journals run a smaller 2L write-on or accept members who publish a note through an open submission process. If you transfer schools, you will typically compete in a transfer write-on at your new school in the summer. And if your goal was a clerkship, note that judges weight grades, recommendations, and writing samples heavily; a strong seminar paper and a professor who will vouch for you can substitute for the line on the resume.

Finally, keep the competition writing sample. Whatever you produced in that week is a polished, self-contained piece of legal analysis, and it can be revised into a writing sample or the seed of a note.