If you’re a legal educator in the U.S., then you’re no doubt aware of the perennial pedagogical debate over theory vs. doctrine vs. practical experience. Even though I’ve been a podium professor for most of my teaching career, I generally agree that law schools should be doing more to prepare our students for legal practice. When advising students on elective course selection, I’m quick to recommend doing clinics, internships, skills courses, and advocacy competitions.
Curiously, I usually have not mentioned law journal participation in the same breath as skills development. Rather, I’ve been more likely to encourage students to pursue journal opportunities because of their credential value. Lately, however, I’ve noticed that some law schools are including their student-edited law journals under the experiential learning sections of their websites. This is an interesting change from touting law journal membership as an academic honor, but perhaps this is a nod to the current marketing value of pitching practical learning experiences. In any case, I’d like to dive into the merits of law journal work as experiential learning, inspired by a recent epiphany I had in my role as a faculty advisor to the Suffolk University Law Review.
The Standard View
Legal educators have long recognized the potential benefits of law journal participation, among the most prominent being:
- Obtaining a valuable employment credential, especially membership on the flagship law review.
- Reinforcing the close, detail-oriented aspects of legal research and writing, including reviewing, editing, and proofreading legal manuscripts; evaluating the merits of legal and policy arguments; and mastering cite checking and basic legal citation form.
- Researching and writing a Note or Comment on a topic of interest, with the possibility of published article.
Of course, that line or two on a resume often captures a lot of precise, brain-taxing, eye-straining grunt work. While some may have soggy, sentimental memories of cite checking, Bluebooking, article editing, and the like, many others regard this experience as having been a simple exchange: In return for this hard, dull slog and a few academic credits, I enjoyed some genuine benefits that enhanced my career prospects.
Some have suggested that this model of scholarly publishing exploits student labor, reasoning that law students are essentially doing unpaid work (with tuition charged to boot) for law professors and other authors. In fact, earlier this year, law students at New York University submitted a petition calling for students to receive compensation for law journal work, reasoning that they are engaging in labor that enhances the credentials and reputations of their authors.
By classifying journal membership as an academic honor that can enhance job and career opportunities, law schools have largely been able to dodge this issue. However, based on extensive work I’ve done concerning unpaid internships, I think it merits fair consideration, which I plan to do in a later post. For now, however, I’d like to look more closely at the educational benefits of law journal work for our students.
My Road to “Duh”
Last summer, I decided that I wanted to be more engaged as a faculty advisor to our flagship law review at Suffolk University Law School. I contacted the senior members of the new editorial board, sharing some ideas and generally expressing my willingness to be an active resource. As luck would have it, I picked a great year to do this outreach. The editors explained to me that one of their top goals was to create a more positive culture for all students involved with the Law Review. They welcomed my interest in being more closely involved in a mentoring and support role.
The students’ desire to create a more positive culture for journal members was music to my ears. My own scholarship and public education work have focused deeply on workplace bullying, harassment, and incivility – behaviors all too familiar in the legal profession. This work has encompassed fields such as organizational psychology and organizational behavior, and the quest to create psychologically healthy workplaces. So, among other things, I shared with the students a blog piece I had written some time ago, articulating an “Eightfold Path” to psychologically healthy workplaces, adding that they could easily apply my points to their work as editors.
By the end of this past academic year, I realized that we, as legal educators, may be vastly underestimating the potential value of law journal training in fostering the development of interpersonal skills relevant to success in legal practice, even if we had been on journals during our own law school days. OK, if you’re among the readers who are thinking “duh, haven’t these educational benefits always been obvious?,” then please skip the rest of this, because you get it already. But to everyone else, I invite you to join me as I look at this a little more deeply.
Soft Skills
For better or worse, the typical organizational chart of a student-edited law journal mimics the hierarchical structures of many law offices in the private and public sectors. New editorial staff (sometimes called “staff editors”) are like first-year associates or staff attorneys. They work under the direction of editorial board members who will issue assignments and review their work (in turn, functioning like mid-level and senior associates or staff attorneys). Among the editors, there exists a hierarchy as well, with the senior board members responsible for the overall operation, similar to the roles of managing partners and managing attorneys.
For new staff members, this may be their first experience of having their written work closely supervised and evaluated by a senior peer. These working relationships may be positive, neutral, or negative in nature. They are, in any event, analogous to working in a law office setting as a newbie trying to demonstrate professional competence and to work effectively with co-workers at all levels of seniority and organizational rank. While the quality of one’s work is the paramount consideration, possessing social and emotional intelligence counts for a lot as well. As such, serving as a journal staff member can be a tremendous opportunity to develop both hard and soft skills that contribute to success in the legal profession.
For students who stay on for a second year as editors, the law journal experience can offer even deeper training in soft skills useful in law practice management and leadership. In fact, the tasks of editing a journal, ensuring quality content, negotiating with authors, organizing events, and overseeing the work of staff members and other editors are very close matches to the managerial and supervisory tasks that many lawyers engage in regularly once they reach the mid and senior levels of practice. The management aspects of editing a journal may call into play qualities of efficiency, dignity, collegiality, diplomacy, and – on occasion – kindness and understanding. At times, thorny or difficult interpersonal issues may arise that require applications of fairness and good judgment. Most importantly, the second-year editors, especially senior board members, can play the most significant roles in creating an overall organizational culture for the journal.
This is a kind of practice-relevant experiential learning and soft skills training that even many clinics and internships cannot provide, because it puts the primary onus on the students to do this on their own, without a clinical professor or supervising attorney to direct or troubleshoot. It causes me to ask if we should be doing more to advise journal participants to use this opportunity for soft skills development and to develop work habits that will be beneficial to them in practice. Moreover, can this be done without adding the equivalent of an organizational behavior and leadership course to their already significant workload?
In any event, I believe that taking a more intentional approach toward injecting these considerations into the experience of being on a student-edited law journal can contribute to a healthier legal profession overall, because these norm-setting lessons will stick for some who assume leadership positions in their law firms, public agencies, public interest groups, and courtrooms. Perhaps some law schools have already taken these steps. (If so, please write to me at [email protected]. It could lead to a follow-up post!) If not, then we should take seriously this opportunity to enhance the educational value of law journal work.
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I happily dedicate this post to the “front office” of the 2022-23 Suffolk University Law Review, who took time from their busy schedules to engage me in many conversations about the work of the journal.
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