A law review is a scholarly journal published by a law school and edited almost entirely by law students, and getting on one usually means winning a spot through a writing competition, strong first-year grades, or some mix of the two at the end of your 1L year. More than 650 student-edited law reviews operate in the United States, which makes them the main publishing vehicle for legal scholarship and one of the most recognized credentials a law student can earn.
What a Law Review Actually Is
Law reviews publish long-form legal analysis: articles by professors, judges, and practitioners alongside shorter pieces written by student members. What sets them apart from academic journals in almost every other field is who runs them. Second- and third-year law students decide which submissions get accepted, edit the manuscripts, verify every footnote, and shepherd each issue to print. Faculty rarely sit in the editor’s chair.
That is unusual. In medicine, economics, physics, and nearly every other discipline, submissions go through blind peer review by faculty experts. Law reversed that convention more than a century ago. As one commentator put it, the most prestigious legal journals are run by students while “in other academic fields, except law, the most prestigious journals are edited by seasoned specialists.”1Illinois Law Review. Law Review vs. Peer Review
A small number of legal journals do use traditional peer review, including the Journal of Legal Studies and the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. HeinOnline categorizes journals as student-edited, peer-edited, or refereed, and some fall into more than one category.2HeinOnline Knowledge Base. Student-Edited, Peer-Edited, and Refereed Journals Still, the student-edited model is the overwhelming norm.
Law reviews are secondary sources of law. They do not create binding rules the way statutes or court opinions do. But lawyers mine law review articles when building arguments on novel questions, and judges sometimes cite influential articles to support a reading of an ambiguous statute. A well-timed piece can shape how courts think about an issue for years.
How Students Get on a Law Review
Selection almost always happens after your first year. Most journals use one of three routes: the write-on competition, a grade-based invitation, or a holistic review that blends the two.
The Write-On Competition
The write-on is the most common path. It usually runs over a compressed window, sometimes as short as a week, during the summer between 1L and 2L year. You receive a closed packet of source materials and must produce a short piece of legal analysis, often a case note, using only those sources. Most competitions also include a technical editing or citation exercise that tests attention to detail. The packet is graded anonymously.
The rules are strict. You generally cannot use Westloring or Lexis, cannot consult professors, and must follow Bluebook citation format throughout. The exercise simulates what law review members actually do: read dense material under time pressure, organize a coherent argument, and get every citation right.
Preparation matters more than raw writing talent. The students who do well tend to know the Bluebook well before the packet drops, treat the competition like a serious deadline, and spend time organizing the source materials before drafting. The citation portion is where many applicants lose points they could have kept.
Grade-On
Some journals extend automatic or conditional offers to students whose 1L grades place them near the top of the class. At the University of Chicago Law Review, roughly twenty students receive grade-based offers each year, though even those students must meet a minimum performance threshold on the writing competition.3University of Chicago Law Review. Becoming a Member The remaining seats go to applicants selected on writing competition performance alone. Grade-on policies vary school by school; some journals use them, others do not.
Holistic Review
A newer approach blends competition scores with a broader evaluation. The Harvard Law Review selects 24 of its 54 incoming members through what it calls an “anonymous holistic review.” Applicants may submit an optional 200-word statement describing their perspectives and experiences. The statement receives no numerical score, and no one is penalized for skipping it.4Harvard Law Review. Writing Competition The stated goal is a staff with varied viewpoints, not just the highest-scoring test-takers.
What Membership Looks Like Once You’re On
Law reviews run on a hierarchy managed almost entirely by students. An Editor-in-Chief directs a board that typically includes executive editors handling logistics, articles editors managing relationships with outside authors, and managing editors overseeing production. Below the board, junior staff members do the bulk of the citation-checking and source-verification work.
The time commitment is real. Staff members routinely spend ten to fifteen hours per week verifying sources during peak production, on top of a full course load. The core task is cite-checking: locating each cited source, finding the exact page and passage, and confirming it actually supports the proposition in the text. A single article can carry 200 to 400 footnotes. The work is tedious, but it builds the kind of close-reading and verification habits the profession demands, and nearly all journals require manuscripts to follow The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation.5The Bluebook. The Bluebook – A Uniform System of Citation
The Student Note Requirement
Most journals require each member to research and write an original student piece, commonly called a Note or Comment, during their second year on staff. A Note typically addresses a focused legal question, such as a split between federal circuits on how to interpret a statute. A Comment is usually organized around a single court decision or piece of pending legislation. The line between the two is not rigid, and some journals use the terms interchangeably. The best student pieces are selected for publication in the journal itself.6Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. Writing a Law Journal Note or Comment
Academic Credit
Some law schools award academic credit for journal work. At NYU Law, third-year students holding positions that require 100 or more hours of work per year can receive two ungraded credits, while those logging between 50 and 99 hours receive one credit.7NYU Law. Academic Credit Journal Work Policies vary, and some schools offer no credit at all.
Flagship Reviews vs. Specialized Journals
Most law schools publish a flagship general-interest law review alongside several specialized journals focused on topics like environmental law, intellectual property, or international affairs. The flagship usually carries the school’s name, as with the Yale Law Journal or the Michigan Law Review, and publishes on any legal subject. Specialized journals, sometimes called secondary journals, have narrower scope and often smaller staffs.
Prestige differences are real. Flagship membership generally carries more weight with employers, and flagship journals tend to attract submissions from higher-profile authors. The workload gap can be significant too: flagship staff typically check more citations per issue and face tighter production schedules. Specialized journals sometimes offer more flexibility, including remote work options, blog writing opportunities, and a less rigid editorial hierarchy. Some secondary journals publish only once or twice a year, or exclusively online, while flagships typically produce four to eight print issues annually.
If you can get onto both the flagship and a specialty journal, the flagship is usually the stronger credential. If the choice is between a specialty journal and no journal at all, the specialty journal is worth taking.
Why Law Review Membership Matters
Law review is one of the most reliable signals of academic achievement a law student can earn. The credential goes on a resume permanently and carries weight well past the first job search.
The impact is most direct for judicial clerkships. Federal judges routinely favor applicants with law review experience, not because it is a formal prerequisite, but because it signals strong writing, attention to detail, and the willingness to do demanding work under deadline. One federal district judge has noted that handling law review tasks is “a good indicator that a person can write well” and that the student has sharpened their proofreading and citation skills beyond where they started.
At large law firms, law review matters less than it once did for initial hiring, which increasingly happens through early interview programs before students have even been selected for journal positions. Where it still counts is in lateral moves, clerkship applications after a few years of practice, and any situation where a hiring committee is weighing two otherwise similar candidates. The skills themselves transfer: the patience required to verify hundreds of citations is decent preparation for the detail work of transactional practice, due diligence, and regulatory compliance.
Students who do not join a law review still build good careers. Many successful lawyers never served on a journal. But for the most competitive positions, particularly appellate clerkships and academic careers, law review membership remains close to essential, and that is why so many 1Ls spend part of their first summer locked in with a source packet and a Bluebook.