One of the most valuable aspects of writing a law review is the opportunity to write and submit an article for publishing. Writing a law review article, or a note that explores a unique legal problem provides you with hands-on experience to increase your likelihood of being chosen for your law review’s administrative panel, as well as to develop your Resume if it is accepted.
Unfortunately, the writing process may be time-consuming and laborious. It might be difficult to choose and create a relevant and interesting topic, do a preliminary check, update your legal study, and verify sources and references.
However,
Before starting a law review article, it is important to understand what it means.
What is a law review article?
Law reviews are research articles that are produced by law students in collaboration with faculty personnel. They include long articles and brief notes from academics and attorneys, as well as student remarks, observations, and changes in the law. Law journal articles frequently focus on emerging or developing areas of legislation and can provide more critical analysis than a law encyclopedia or ALR item.
Typically, students begin the distribution of journals by publishing papers written by legal instructors and researchers. In the areas covered in the evaluations, the law students provide references, observations, and suggestions.
Choosing a Topic/Theme
Choosing a current and engaging theme is the first stage of drafting a unique law review article. It’s important to start filtering through potential article ideas as soon as you’ve been accepted to law review and to understand how to distinguish the best topics.
Current legal trends might help you identify a problem or significant recent ruling that could be the subject of a journal article or law review. Cases, legislation, legal writing process, and journals, as well as a non-legal resource of material, are all available in numerous law archives and can help you focus your research on a subject.
Current legal trends might assist you in locating a problem or a significant recent ruling. You may search via topics ranging from bankruptcies and licensing to trade and employment and financial regulatory in nearly every major legal database, such as Westlaw or Harvard law review.
Outlining your Article
The proportion of chapters, sections, and subcategories will vary depending on how your topic develops logically. Case notes, which are generally in sequential order, can be summarized as follows:
- Introduction – 2-3 pages, stating the issue and why it is essential.
- Background – This section explains the problem’s context. It should contain all of the materials you’ll need for your study, such as cases, law review articles, and so on. Integrate instances and theory as much as possible. To help the reader navigate this content, use descriptive headers.
- The Main Case – This is where the current issue is presented.
- The case under consideration
- The issue with the court’s decision
- Problem evaluation (Your valued contribution towards research).
- Give a quick recap of the issue.
- Your problem evaluation and/or
- The solution you came up with.
- The solution’s strengths.
- The solution’s drawbacks.
- Describe why you believe your option is the most effective.
- The Conclusion.
How to Write a Law Review Introduction
The utmost essential step to take at the introduction of a law review article is to catch the reader’s interest and give them optimism that what follows will be genuinely captivating. This is a page-turner, somewhat unconventional, to say the least. Possibly, something not even related to a law review article.
After getting this attention-grab maneuver out of the picture, the reader has to be gently persuaded that, herein as everywhere, freedom and exemption are doubtful, and that the text to follow now is, after all, a law review article.
The introduction should concisely position the majority of the article’s layout. Readers will go to the introduction for assistance if the theme itself is complicated. The introduction of an article should not include any significant surprises, and it is also not the place to provide extensive arguments.
Having stated that,
In most cases, the introduction must be concise i.e. a Maximum of 3-5 double-spaced pages. The length of the introductory section should not be a big deal as long as it does not chew off the arguments and analyses in the main case section of the article.
The article review committee would not immediately discard it if the introduction is just one page or longer than four pages long. It is acceptable if the introduction is comprehensive enough to give out a clear blueprint for the remainder of the article.
Writing the Background in a Law Review Article
The “background” section comes immediately in the Introduction. It is easier to describe existing legislation, facts, or events than it is to articulate and justify an original assertion. Consider this part to be the explanation section for the components that are required to grasp the problem.
For example, if you’re discussing how self-defense weapons should be treated by the law, you’ll need to describe the information concerning such weapons that are required to comprehend under the rules. Explain the origins of stun guns just to the degree that it is required to comprehend the regulatory framework. Do not go into detail about the chemistry of pepper sprays or other similar products.
If you have a prominent example that you want to analyze and compare with the circumstance you’re reporting about, you’ll need to go through it in-depth in the argument section. In the background discussion portion, don’t restate all of this information. And don’t get into the details of the incident if you don’t want to know them to comprehend the law.
Instead, express the applicable rule simply and in as much detail as necessary, citing your sources in the references.
Writing Problem Evaluation of a law review article
A good law review article argument should be (1) original, (3) nonobvious, (4) valuable, (5) strong, and (6) regarded as legally sound, completely novel, and competent by the readers.
This is accurate whether the writer is an undergraduate, a legal secretary, an experienced specialist, or a researcher. The majority of effective original articles include a core thesis or an assertion about the world.
The claim might be a chronological assertion, a statement about the impacts of law, or a remark about how judges are evaluating a law, or it can be a descriptive assertion about the world as it is. It might be a prescriptive statement regarding how something should be done. It might also be a hybrid claim that has both descriptive and prescriptive elements.
The Article’s descriptive and prescriptive sections
The most compelling arguments are those that blend descriptive and prescriptive elements, informing readers about the information they didn’t know before. The argument might be about what tribunals have done, how a judicial ruling affects people’s conduct, or why a law has evolved in a certain way while also recommending what should be performed.
For example,
Start writing on free speech and the law against hostile public accommodation harassment. Then, the first piece of data you should provide is about the tribunals and regulatory bodies that impose penalties when businesses tolerate speech that fosters an ethnically, culturally, religiously or socially hostile atmosphere for some customers.
You might simply evaluate the unfavorable public accommodation environment restrictions and argue why they should be kept, amended, or eliminated using First Amendment precedents and theory.
Adding Novelty
Your article must be unique to be impactful. It has to convey something unique that no one else has expressed before. It’s not adequate that your insights are unique to you in the respect that you thought out yourself.
Here are some ideas on how to make your claim more refined:
- Consider what unique features exist in some of the circumstances addressed by your argument but not in others.
- Consider the arguments you’ll use to back up your assertion. Do they perform well in certain situations but not in others, as you ask? You might choose to restrict the argument as a result.
- Both the easy “yes” and the straightforward “no” answers to most legal inquiries tend to elicit a plethora of literature.
Writing a Conclusion for a Law Review article
The conclusion is meant to bring everything to a close. It virtually always should be a conventional wrap. Since law review, editors are looking for a normative payout, and law review authors should be happy to oblige.
In the end, you should recall individuals of the importance of your essay in the argument. State your main point and the most essential sub-conclusions.
It’s possible that your article began as a strategy to make and verify a single original, nonobvious, valuable, and sound point. However, you may have discovered numerous more innovative, nonobvious, beneficial, and sound points to say in the course of writing your piece to support that central assertion.
Make sure to highlight the ramifications of your argument, as well as your method for addressing it. These assist in demonstrating the significance of not only your issue but also your interpretation, which is your contribution. If you create a test, for example, briefly outline how the test may be used in other situations. If you create a classification scheme, make a quick note of where else it may be useful.
The Mechanics of a Law Review Article
- Use Double spaces.
- Use a one-inch space on all sides.
- Make a page numbering system.
- Do not start a new section on a separate page if there is an opportunity to start it on the previous page. Large swaths of blank paper should be avoided.
- Follow your outline’s Headings and make as many subheadings as necessary.
- Instead of endnotes, use footnotes.
Bonus Tips
Apart from the procedure mentioned above, best law review articles should always have the following points.
- Make sure that all footnotes are after their respective textual phrases, not in the middle.
- Readers should be guided by a plethora of useful and helpful headings and subheadings, which are just as vital as the content of the piece.
- Use particular graphic techniques to assist you to convey all points easier to grasp, such as numerical listings, bullet points, illustrations, and graphs.
- Long block quotes should be avoided at all costs since they detract from the readability and coherence of your content.
- Make sure that sentence structures vary, and that they aren’t more than 2 to 25 words lengthy.
- To effectively catch readers’ interest, try writing in a more colloquial and polished way.
- Because it seems monotonous and unpleasant, avoid producing a sleep-inducing, front-end, and omnipresent explanation of your law journal articles’ key substance.
However, if you are still uncertain or have very little time on your hand you can always acquire expert assistance online. Hill Papers is the best custom writing service that offers assistance at the most affordable writing rates available. Our staff of top quality writers can flawlessly produce law review articles for any academic or professional level.
Also Read:
