How to Write a Law Review Note

A Note makes an argument. A research paper describes a body of law. If a reader finishes your draft and cannot state your claim in one sentence beginning with 'courts should' or 'Congress should' or 'the better reading is,' you have written a paper and your journal will tell you so.

The standard formula is descriptive plus normative: courts (or agencies, or legislatures) are doing X; X is wrong or incoherent for reasons Y; the correct approach is Z. Everything in the Note serves that sentence. Eugene Volokh's Academic Legal Writing frames the criteria as novelty, nonobviousness, utility, and soundness, and those are the criteria most faculty advisors are actually applying even when they do not name them.

Novelty does not mean nobody has written about your area. It means nobody has made your specific argument. A Note arguing that the Second Circuit's test for a particular FLSA exemption misreads the statutory text is novel even if fifty articles discuss the FLSA. A Note arguing that qualified immunity is bad is not.

The reliable topic generators are: unresolved circuit splits; a statute or regulation enacted in the last 18 months that courts have not yet construed; a Supreme Court decision that unsettles a lower-court framework; and a conflict between two doctrinal lines that nobody has noticed collide. The 2024 overruling of Chevron deference in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, for example, generated years of Note topics because every regulatory field now has an open question about what happens to precedents built on deference.

Find splits through circuit-split roundups (Bloomberg Law's U.S. Law Week and the Seton Hall Circuit Review both publish them), through cert petitions on SCOTUSblog's petitions page, and by reading dissents — a dissent that says 'we now part ways with the Ninth Circuit' is a topic handed to you.

Pick something narrow enough that you can say something complete. 'Reforming the Fourth Amendment' is not a topic. 'Whether the private-search doctrine applies to cloud storage providers' is a topic.

Preemption means someone already published your argument. Discovering it in March, after you have written 60 pages, is the single most common Note disaster. Do the check before you commit and repeat it before you submit and again before publication.

Search full text, not just titles, across: HeinOnline's Law Journal Library; Westlaw and Lexis secondary-source databases; SSRN and bepress Digital Commons (for forthcoming work that has not printed yet); Google Scholar; and the Index to Legal Periodicals. Search the doctrinal term, the leading case name, and the statutory section number separately, because authors label the same problem differently. Set a Westlaw or SSRN alert on your key terms for the rest of the year.

Partial preemption is survivable and normal. If an article covers your issue but reaches a different conclusion, addresses only one circuit, or predates a key decision, you can distinguish it — but you must cite it and say explicitly what you add. Write a short preemption memo for your advisor listing the five closest pieces and your distinction from each. Many journals require this as part of a prospectus.

Almost every published student Note uses the same architecture, and you should not innovate here. An Introduction of three to six pages that opens with a concrete hook (a case, a factual scenario), states the problem, states your thesis explicitly, and closes with a roadmap paragraph. Part I gives the background a smart reader outside your subfield needs — statutory history, doctrinal development — and nothing more. Part II is the analysis: what the courts are actually doing, why the approaches conflict, and why the dominant approach fails. Part III is your proposal, including a counterarguments subsection and an honest statement of the proposal's limits. The Conclusion is one or two paragraphs and adds nothing new.

Part I is where drafts go wrong. Students who are anxious about their thesis write a treatise instead. Keep Part I under a quarter of the Note. The engine is Parts II and III.

Typical length is 8,000 to 15,000 words including footnotes, or roughly 25 to 40 journal pages, but this varies substantially by journal — some flagship journals want 30-plus pages, some specialty and online companions want 5,000 words. Get your journal's written requirements before you outline.

Under Bluebook Rule 1.1, every sentence in a law review piece that is not your own original assertion needs a supporting footnote. In practice that means most sentences. Cite as you draft; reconstructing citations later costs more time than writing the Note. Save a PDF of every source in a folder named by footnote number, because your cite checkers will demand the source for every proposition and unsourced footnotes get cut.

The rules you will use constantly: Rule 2 for law review typeface conventions (which differ from the Bluepages you learned in 1L); Rule 1.2 for introductory signals and Rule 1.4 for their order; Rule 1.5 for explanatory parentheticals; Rule 3.2 for pincites, which are required whenever you rely on a specific page; Rule 4 for short forms, noting that under Rule 4.2 supra is not used for cases, statutes, or constitutions; Rule 5.1 for block quotations, which are required at 50 or more words; and Rule 16.7.1 for citing student-written material, which requires a designation such as 'Note' or 'Comment' after the author's name.

Two substantive habits matter more than formatting. Never cite a headnote — read and cite the opinion text. Never cite a secondary source for a proposition about primary law without reading the primary source yourself; cite checkers will find the discrepancy and it damages your credibility with the editorial board.

This varies by school, and the variation is driven by whether your journal treats the Note as a membership requirement, a graduation writing requirement, a seminar credit, or all three. A common 2L-year schedule: topic proposal in September or early October; preemption memo and prospectus in October or November; detailed outline before winter break; complete first draft in January; Notes editor comments in February; revised draft in March; publication selection in late spring; editing and cite checking over the following summer and fall.

Know which standard applies to you. Many schools require a Note of 'publishable quality' to graduate or to keep journal membership, which is a lower bar than actual publication. Journals typically publish only a fraction of member Notes.

Build in slack for the event that a court decides your issue mid-draft. It happens. Usually it is survivable — a Supreme Court or en banc decision resolving your split often makes the Note more timely if you pivot to critiquing the new rule or addressing the questions it leaves open. Talk to your advisor immediately rather than hoping nobody notices.

In-house publication by your own journal is by far the most likely path and requires only that you meet the deadlines and impress your Notes editors. Submit early drafts and take the edits seriously; editors advocate for Notes they have already invested in.

For outside submission, most journals accept through Scholastica, and the main submission windows are roughly February to March and August to September. Two cautions: many flagship journals do not accept unsolicited student work at all, so read each journal's policy before spending the submission fee, and specialty journals in your subject area are far more receptive to student pieces. Also check whether your school permits publishing a Note elsewhere while receiving in-house credit for it.

Even unpublished, the Note is your best writing sample for clerkship and firm applications and often the only long-form analytical work you will produce in law school. Write it as though a judge will read it, because one might.