We lost an article to another law review by 30 minutes today. I knew we were competing against other journals, but never thought the competition would come so close. Another example: a week ago an author emailed us to expedite an article with a 48-hour offer from Georgetown. We mobilized the entire office to read the article quickly and asked the author to request an extension from Georgetown (btw, GLJ articles editor, if you are reading this, you know what happened. ). We made an offer before the deadline, only to find out that the author would repeat this process between us and Stanford, requested an extension from us, and eventually got an offer from Stanford.

On the upside, some interesting submissions we’ve come across lately.
- one article spanned 300 pages and had 1000+ footnotes. (the norm is about 50-80 pages and 200 footnotes)
- one author, apparently a new law school grad, sent in with the article a recommendation letter from a professor, who wrote little more than the following line: “time does not permit me to write more, but I think this may be worth publishing.”
- one article was about the use of the word “f*ck,” and examined the history, modern status, legal status, etc., of the word.
- one article was 10 pages long. Stapled with it was the author’s CV, which was about 20 pages long.
- and many, many more that I don’t even remember.

I met a friend of mine in the quad today. I hadn’t seen him almost all semester long so we chatted for a while. He said he was going to the gym and asked what I had been up to lately. I admitted that I might have seemed all but disappeared and that I was busy with journal work and hadn’t been going to the gym at all.

“You see,” I explained, “I found out that I changed so much in the past two years. Before coming to law school I thought I could be one of the few students who wouldn’t care about grades at all. I had worked for a number of years and knew grades wouldn’t matter much once you are out of school; I have a family and know there are things more important than grades. But less than two years into law school I got sucked into this law school rat race: first you need good 1L grades to get a decent summer job, then you need even better grades to make the journal, then you need good 2L grades to apply for clerkships, and to get good clerkships you will need good board positions in the journal — which is what got me so far. Not to say that I don’t like law school — I do — but it’s just that it’s hard to get out of all this…”

My friend shook his head. “It’s not that hard. The way I look at it,” he said, “is this: I needed good grades from high school to get into a good college . . .”

I looked at him, a graduate of one of the elite colleges in the U.S., and winked.

He continued, “then I needed good grades in college to get into a good law school. But after law school, I am all done. I don’t need to show my transcript to anyone else once I get a job. This is my last degree, and I am a 2L, so I am taking it easy.”

I sighed, “maybe I should hang out with you more often.”

Then he headed off to the gym, and I went to the library to pick up yet another pile of articles to read for tonight.

* * *

On the way there, I saw posters announcing the finalists of the moot court. The final is scheduled for tomorrow, and I will certainly go there to see what it is like. Three out of the four finalists are members of the outgoing Law Review ed board–one notes editor, one articles editor, one symposium editor. As if I had totally forgotten about my earlier conversation, I started thinking about signing up for next year’s moot court. Then I realized the irony, and gave up the thought.

The 2008 US news law school ranking got leaked today. I took a quick look at it, and thought it would sell very well this year.

Main selling points:
Penn tied with Chicago at #6.
UVA and Texas each dropped 2 spots.

Makes you wonder what Penn did right and what Chicago, UVA, and Texas did wrong in the past year. Or, maybe the real question is, what value is left in the U.S. News ranking?

This week in my jurisdiction class we will read Erie, Hanna, etc. 1L memories came back.

In other news, I am busy as usual between reading papers, editing the article assigned to me, and reading cases. My schedule these days is 9 a.m. to 1 a.m. almost non-stop. I don’t think my 1L year was this packed.