Academic

Should GPA Count In Selecting Law Review Members?

By Dan Filler

Summertime.  Long days.  Hot nights.  And large numbers of rising 2L's wondering whether they'll be selected for Law Review.  One of the factors that most law school Law Reviews seem to consider, in picking their new editors, is classroom success.  GPA and/or class rank usually matter a bit.  Often, they matter a lot.  There are a variety of ways in which this information can enter the mix.  Some schools reserve some slots for the very best students, and give the remaining positions to those who write on.  Some students use a grading formula for the writing competition that includes GPA or rank.  Some schools find other ways to mix the twin skills of preparing a good competition entry and testing well.  And a few schools ignore grades altogether.

I don't have a sense of the dominant selection paradigm today.  But I wonder whether grades ought to count.  I see two distinct reasons to consider grades in the selection process.  The first is an institutional - rather than a journal - objective.  A law school may want to insure that its strongest students can bulk up their resume.  If you want to snag more judicial clerkships (and you're not a top 10 school), for example, you'd want your most attractive clerkship candidates (say, the top 5%) to have the most attractive resume possible.  But the journal might have an independent reason to desire strong students.  Maybe great students make great editors and/or note writers.  In my experience, this is indeed true to a substantial - but not unlimited - extent.

The problem, of course, is that some segment of top students will also slack.  Some don't have the detail orientation for cite checking.  Some want the Law Review as a resume checkoff - which they achieve simply by joining - and don't care at all about discharging their obligations to the journal.   And some may not be good at editorial tasks.  At the same time, every law school class has a group of students who don't test that well....but who can write, edit, or cite-check up a storm.   Both the institution and the journal have a stake in building a better law review, and the  school also has a stake in finding metrics that make these talented not-great-test-takers stand out in some way.

My own taste is to have a Law Review that holds a small number of slots for top students, holds a moderate number of slots for pure competition peformance, and gives the remaining positions to people based on a mix of testing and competition performance.  Call me a moderate - but it seems to me that this optimizes the process.  Of course, I leave for another day the question of whether faculty should have any say in this decision at all...

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on July 08, 2009 (boomark / email).