Academic Legal Writing - Eugene Volokh [100]
5. Publish and publicize
See Part XXIII.
6. Think about your next article
See Part XXIII.G.
XIX. A SAMPLE HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL STUDENT ARTICLE
In this Part, we'll spend some time looking at an excellent example of a student article, and seeing what makes it excellent. You are of course already overloaded with reading. But time spent closely examining someone else's successful project is likely to help you succeed with your own project.
The article I chose, Smith and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act: An Iconoclastic Assessment, 78 Va. L. Rev. 1407 (1992), has been exceptionally successful. It has been cited in other articles over 120 times. (Probably over 99.5% of all articles written by full-time law professors get fewer than 100 citations.) It has an excellent reputation among religious freedom scholars. And it likely helped its author, Jim Ryan, get a teaching job at the University of Virginia—when he was hired, this article plus one co-written article were Ryan's only published pieces.
The article's success also shows that a student note can be very influential even if it isn't published in Harvard, Yale, or Stanford. The Virginia Law Review is a great journal, in which I would always be happy to publish, but it is not seen as being at the very pinnacle of the law review hierarchy. The list of other student articles with more than 100 citations includes articles in the lead journals at Missouri, Hastings, Fordham, Minnesota, Vanderbilt, USC, UCLA, Penn, Michigan, and Columbia.
And the article offers lessons for all student articles, not just the extraordinarily successful ones. I chose Ryan's piece partly because of its stunning citation count. But a student work can be a great success even if it's only cited a few times, or if it's never cited but impresses those who might hire the author. The same things that make some works extraordinarily successful can make many more works highly successful.
So here's the article. The Ryan material—marked with a vertical bar in the left-hand margin—includes all the text, but to shorten the material I've removed the appendices, most of the footnotes, and some of the citations in the remaining footnotes. (This Part is not meant to teach proper footnoting; as you read the material, you can assume that all the assertions are well supported in the original.) I've also numbered the paragraphs, to make it easier to discuss them.
The material without the vertical bar is my running commentary on what makes various sections and passages effective, and (occasionally) how they might have been made still better. Despite my occasional criticisms, keep in mind that this is an excellent work, offered as a sample that you might want to emulate.
Let's start by reading the entire Introduction:
Smith and The Religious Freedom Restoration Act: An Iconoclastic Assessment
James E. Ryan
INTRODUCTION
[¶ 1] As perhaps befits the subject, the nature of the academic discussion surrounding the Free Exercise Clause is largely just that: academic. Erudite and often esoteric, the discussion contains numerous theoretical expositions on the proper approach to the Free Exercise Clause, either alone or in tandem with the Establishment Clause. There are arguments on the proper relationship between government and religion, theories on how best to define religion, expositions of the history of the clause, and a recognition of the inability of courts and society to deal properly with adherents of minority religions. For all the discussion, however, very little attention is paid to the actual cases, save those that are decided in the United States Supreme Court. Even these cases often receive only scant recognition—the author pausing long enough to explain how and why the Court erred—on the way toward yet another theory of free exercise. Lower court cases, at either the appellate or trial level, are hardly mentioned at all.
[¶ 2] This inattention to how courts have actually been treating the free exercise claimant may explain why