Academic Legal Writing - Eugene Volokh [149]
Even if the law review doesn't let you put up the final version of the article on SSRN, you should ask for an electronic version that you can e-mail to people. Sometimes lawyers and professors in other disciplines, who don't have Westlaw, Lexis, or HeinOnline access, see a citation to an article, or see it mentioned in an online discussion, and e-mail the author asking for a copy. You want to be ready for that.
G. Planning the Next Article
After you've published your piece, you might never want to write another law review article again. But if you do want to write more, look back over your article to see where it can lead you.
To begin with, while writing the article you've probably several times thought, “that's an interesting related question, but it's too much for me to take on.” For instance, if you wrote an article about religious freedom provisions and drug laws, you might have focused only on the government acting as sovereign (banning all drug possession by everyone) and set aside the government acting as employer (firing employees for consuming drugs) or as proprietor (barring drug use on government property, such as public parks). Dealing with the other areas would have made an already tough project unmanageable.
Consider writing a separate article about one of these questions, especially since you've already educated yourself on the basic field (here, religious freedom). Better yet, consider returning to these questions but at a broader level. Don't just write on the government as employer and religious drug use, which some might see as too close to your previous work and thus less impressive. Instead, try writing on the government as employer and religious freedom more generally, perhaps using drug use as a prominent test case.
Likewise, as you were developing your approach to one area, you might have seen connections to other areas (see Part V.F, p. 70): For instance, if you were writing on how waiting periods for gun purchases should be evaluated under state constitutional rights to keep and bear arms, you might have also noticed that your general reasoning could be applied to waiting periods for abortions under state constitutional rights to privacy. This may have been too tangential a point to cover thoroughly in your earlier piece, but why not use your thinking as the basis for a new article, perhaps one on waiting periods and constitutional rights more generally?
So build on what you learned while writing your old work; but make sure that you say something new.
XXIV. ENTERING WRITING COMPETITIONS
A. Why You Should Do This
Many organizations run legal writing competitions, usually on a particular subject—admiralty law, health law, Second Amendment law, and other subjects. These competitions offer three benefits:
1. Money: The prizes range from a few hundred dollars to $5000 or more.
2. A credential: You can note the award on your resume, in cover letters, and in job interviews. People who work in the field will probably be fairly impressed that a professional organization—to which they themselves might belong—has given an award to your article.
3. Publication: Some of the organizations arrange to publish the winning entries, either in a practitioner journal or in a law review.
Several Web sites list many competitions, often sorted by topic, deadline, and award size; http://volokh.com/writing//competitions links to those sites.
If you've already written a paper for publication, it makes sense to also submit it to one or more of these writing competitions. (If you're submitting to