Law School Writing Competition

In this week's Law School Diaries column, law student "Elle Woods" describes the process of competing for admission to UPenn's Law Review by entering the Writing Competition.

Elle's Law School Diary:

I have had so much trouble explaining to my non-law schools friends and family how torturous the Writing Competition (WC) is.  “So what exactly do you write?  Oh but you like writing.” No, folks, the WC is poorly named.  It should probably be called the “Edit and Cite-Check Until Your Hand Falls Off” Competition. Let’s see if I can do a better job now that it’s over and my brain has had some time to rest.

WC is the exam you take to be admitted to a school’s law journals.  It was developed originally for Law Review, but now most schools have other journals, too.  I can’t speak much about the process or journals at other schools, but at Penn, Law Review is the place to be.  It’s the elite journal, and it’s a filter for employers; if they see Law Review on your resume, they automatically assume that you’re among the smartest at the school.  Out of the 250 1Ls who participate in the WC, Law Review takes about 40.  And if you’re not on Law Review, it really doesn’t matter which secondary journal you’re on, so long as you’re actually on one.  To most employers, East Asia Law Review is the same as Journal of Business Law.

Every law school has a WC, and they all vary in format and length.  Basically the way it works is, after you finish your last exam and want nothing more than to go drown your happiness/exhaustion at the bar, you have this voice in the back of your head telling you that 1L year isn’t quite over.  Two days after my last exam, I had to sit through two grueling ten-hour long sessions of editing and cite-checking.  I was given 15 pages of a fake, purposely-butchered article and the relevant foot notes, along with two hundred pages of sources.  For those twenty hours I sat in a windowless classroom and edited the essay using special editing symbols and looking up how to properly cite every sort of obscure source imaginable, from the Bible to an international treaty.  They tell you during the training sessions that you’re welcome to take as many breaks as you want, and they in fact encourage it.  But every time I had an urge to go for a walk, I’d look around and see everyone else still hard at work, and I’d grudgingly flip open my Bluebook and move on to the next source.  After 20 hours I had only made it through ten pages, which is about the average.

After the second session you emerge from the room covered in white-out and hand-spazzing, but there’s a sense of relief - a very short-lived sense of relief because then you remember that you’re still not done.  Penn’s Writing Competition involves a take-home portion, which is requires an essay and a personal statement.  The essay is essentially a “comment” for which they give you 300 page source-pack of newspaper/magazine articles, articles from websites, YouTube clips, cartoons, graphs, etc.  It’s all completely random and lacks any sense of cohesiveness.  But tying them together is our job.  Our assignment is essentially to develop some sort of creative thesis and use the source-pack for support.

We’re lucky at Penn because apparently everyone makes a journal, it’s just a matter of whether it’s your first choice or your fifth.   The funny thing is, very few people actually want to be on a journal - it’s something you do because you have to.  The work is overly time consuming and tedious and our time could better be spent elsewhere.  So all the while you’re editing during the WC and hoping you make Law Review, a tiny part of you hopes that you don’t.   One of my friends told me he wasn’t going to be participating in the WC and when I asked him why not he laughed and said it wasn’t for him.  “The Writing Competition is like a pie-eating contest,” he said, “where the prize after eating all that pie is….more pie.”

Photo by Allie Brosh / CC BY-NC-ND 3.0