Academic Legal Writing - Eugene Volokh [7]
And the influence of student law review articles isn't limited to a few high-impact pieces. Courts cite student articles at the rate of at least about 500 citations per year. This means that over 1/8 of all court citations to law review articles are to student-written articles, and a typical student article is about 40% as likely to get cited as a typical non-student article—an excellent rate for student work. Law review articles appear to cite student articles at the rate of about 15,000 per year.
Top 10 journals do get a disproportionate share of the cites—but over 70% of the court citations in a sample that I've examined (the approximately 500 citations in 2006) came from non-top-10 journals, over 50% came from non-top-25 journals, and over 10% came from specialty journals (including those at many schools below the top 10). The sample included at least five cites each to the general journals at American, Arizona, Baylor, Georgia, Indiana, North Carolina, St. John's, Temple, the University of Washington, and Wisconsin.
Writing an article is also one of the hardest things you will do, whether you write it as a law review note, as an independent study project, or as a side project in your first years in practice. Your pre-law-school writing experience and your first-year writing class will help prepare you for it, but only partly. It's not easy to create an original scholarly work that contributes to our understanding of the law.
Seminar papers tend to be less ambitious and less time-consuming, in part because they don't have to be publishable. But they too help improve your writing—and if you invest enough effort into writing them, you can then easily make them publishable, and get extra benefit from your hard work.
In this book, I try to give some advice, based on my own writing experience and on discussions with others, for you to combine with other advice you get. These ideas have worked for me, and I hope they work for you.
Different parts of this book relate to different stages of your project. If you're just trying to get on law review, I suggest that you read Part XXV, about getting on law review, Part VII, about getting the first draft done, and Parts IX through XVI, about writing and editing. If you're writing a Note, seminar paper, or article, I suggest that you:
1. Skim the Table of Contents, to see the various topics that the book covers.
2. Start by reading Part I, on choosing a claim, Part II, on test suites, and Part XXVI, on academic ethics.
3. If you can, read Part XIX, which reprints and analyzes a very successful student article. Closely examining this successful article may help you succeed with your own article.
4. Read the short Part XXI as well, if you're writing a seminar term paper.
5. Once you identify a potential topic, read Part VIII, on research, and Part XVII, on using evidence correctly. (Read Parts XVII.G–XVII.I only if you plan to use social science evidence.)
6. When you're ready to start writing—which I hope you will be, soon—read Parts III through VII, on structuring your article.
7. As you get close to the end of your first draft, consider rereading Part I again, to see how you can improve your article in light of what you've learned while you were writing it.
8. Once you're done with the first draft, focus on editing it; read Parts IX through XVI, on writing and editing.
9. If you're a law journal staffer or editor, read Parts XVII and XXII to help you understand how to better cite-check others' articles, as well as how to better write your own.
10. When you're ready to publish the article, or publish the seminar paper that you've turned into a publishable article, read Parts XXIII and XXIV.
For more advice, read Elizabeth Fajans & Mary R. Falk, Scholarly Writing for Law Students: Seminar