Writing a student article

Journal of Legal Education

Volumn 48, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 247-269

  Volokh, Eugene ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 22444451919     PISSN: 00222208     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (14)

1. For more advice, check out Elizabeth Fajans & Mary R. Falk, Scholarly Writing for Law Students: Seminar Papers, Law Review Notes, and Law Review Competition Papers (St Paul, 1995) ;
2. Richard Delgado, How to Write a Law Review Article, 20 U. S. F. L. Rev. 445 (1986).
3. It should go without saying that when you're submitting your work for a grade, you should focus on what your faculty adviser recommends.
4. I am indebted for this formulation to Stephen L. Carter, Academic Tenure and "White Male" Standards: Some Lessons from the Patent Law, 100 Vale L. J. 2065, 2083 (1991).
5. 1996 Utah L. Rev. 917.
6. All these claims are, of course, just examples. I don't vouch for their correctness, and I don't even recommend that you write about them.
7. Some people argue that very flexible tests are actually better than seemingly more rigid ones; if you share this view, you might reject my approach here. Remember, though, that many readers will quite properly worry about how your mushy test will actually work out in practice. For your article to work, you must either make the test more determinate or persuade these readers to accept its relative indeterminacy.
8. Giles K. Chesterton, Beverly Hills High School.
9. I owe this expression to Judge Kozinski.
10. This quotation and those that follow are from student papers I've read-some by very good students.
11. Some law reviews claim that they want submissions in other formats-for instance, doublespaced-but I've never gotten any flak about my method, and I suspect that most editors prefer articles formatted the way I describe.
12. Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome. The civil procedure aspects of the Thunderdome judicial system-especially the trial by combat, where the mantra is "Two men enter, one man leaves"-are more controversial.
13. Sources: much e-mail from many people; Joseph Stevens, Legal Language, Plain and Simple, Mo. B. Bull., Mar. 1993, at 4. For an even more thorough list
14. see Bruce Ross-Larson, Edit Yourself: A Manual for Everyone Who Works with Words (New York, 1996).