write on, write off

Journal selections were announced earlier this week, and I didn’t get invited to be on any of them. Which is probably because I didn’t submit a write-on packet.

I had you going for a second, didn’t I? DIDN’T I??? C’mon, admit it.

I fully intended to participate, I really did. I went to the first mandatory meeting in April, where all the journal people got up and spoke (and spoke, and spoke, and spoke, and spoke some more) about their respective journals and why we should list theirs first. We have law review, an estate planning journal, and an administrative law journal. I guess pretty much everybody lists law review as their first choice, but if law review doesn’t pick you then your packet goes to the next in line on your order of preference. I also went to the second meeting in April, where we learned about editing and all the symbols and hieroglyphics to use on the editing portion of the competition.

Incidentally, contrary to what you might think, the acronym MOUS does not stand for Midgets Of Unusual Size, like I initially feared thought, nor for Mimes Of Unusual Size (DEAR GOD THE HORROR), but rather for Manual Of Usage and Style or something like that. I learned that at the meeting, too.

I don’t know what in the world is going on with that red flashing text, but that was the only video I could find. Okay, I didn’t really look that hard. Whatever.

Oh! And did you guys know that inside that ROUS costume is a REAL LIVE MIDGET?!?!? Not even kidding. He scampers, and he scampers like a champ.

So, back to me. I went to the meetings and paid attention. After my last exam, I went up to the third floor of the library and picked up a packet for the competition. It was filled with lots of paper. I read all the instructions. I even took the packet with me out of town and I read cases in the car. No, not while I was driving, of course. Ninja Mimi was driving. Reading while driving is NOT safe.

The task was this:

Here’s a packet of a bunch of cases. The first case (Snyder v. Phelps, 4th Circuit) is the one you’re going to write a comment on. For your 10-page comment with footnotes, you can only use the cases we’ve given you in this packet. You may not do ANY outside research. None at all. In fact, we’ll be monitoring your Westlaw and Lexis Nexis accounts to see if you’re logging on during the two weeks you’ll have to prepare your comment. You may not need to use all of the cases we’ve provided you, and that’s okay, too. You just can’t use any others. The comment is worth 60%-70% of your score, depending on each journal’s standards.

For the remaining 30%-40%, you have to complete an editing exercise. We’ve provided you with a pretty darn crappy writing sample that’s chock-a-block full of errors of all sorts: spelling errors, citation errors, grammar errors, word choice errors, etc. You must go through this sample and correctly mark each and every error you find and provide a notation citing which rule in which book is being violated. So, for example, if you come across a citation error, you’ll mark it appropriately and note that it violates rule 10.2 of the Bluebook or whatever. All this editing business must be done in red pen. No exceptions.

Both parts of the packet are due two weeks from today. You just thought you were done with school for a little while.

So! I took my packet of cases in the car and I read Snyder v. Phelps (which is really a very interesting case, by the way) and some of the other cases, and then I fell asleep in the car and didn’t wake up until we’d reached our destination. And I don’t know, y’all, but something weird happened to me while I was asleep in the car. When I woke up, I was all of a sudden around 97% sure I did NOT want to do the write-on competition. No particular reason. I just knew I wasn’t going to do it.

Does this happen to any of you? Your brain makes a decision for you and you didn’t even ask it to, and you don’t know why it did? . . . No? Just me? Hm.

Well, naturally I set out to try to figure out exactly why I wouldn’t be participating in the write-on competition, since my brain had apparently come to this conclusion completely on its own initiative–sua sponte, if you will. Bwahaha. Look at me, so fancy.

I called my brother and asked him to rate his level of regret for not being on a journal, with 1 being the least amount of regret possible and 10 being maximum regret. He rated it a 2. Then he asked his wife, my most fabulous sister-in-law, and she gave it a 2. My brother is doing exactly what (I think) I want to do when I get out of law school: solo criminal defense. My sister-in-law is doing what I hope to be doing if I change my mind or the solo thing doesn’t work out: working at a firm. Neither of them was on a journal, and neither of them regrets it. Hm.

I did an informal Twitter survey and asked what people thought about the importance of law review. The replies I got were overwhelmingly in favor of not submitting a packet. Hm. A few did encourage me to finish it, though, and they made a good point: why not? Law review looks great on your resume, and you get good writing and editing experience. In some schools (including mine), you can get an hour or two of credit for being on a journal. And anyway, it probably opens some doors that might be closed to people who weren’t on law review or another journal. These are all really good points.

However, I had already succumbed to The Meh, so these good arguments in favor of law review fell upon deaf ears and a heart of stone. The Meh is an insidious entity that creeps in, rather ninja-like, actually, and takes over your soul and makes you feel pretty much just like this:

In short, The Meh is 100% incompatible with law review. They’re diametrically opposed. Polar opposites. Night and day. Chocolate and broccoli. Choccoli? Gross.

I mean, I don’t aspire to work at a big firm. It just doesn’t even appeal to me, really. I’ve been my own boss, more or less, for the past 12 years. I like being my own boss. I like it a lot. In fact, it’s hard for me to imagine myself not bossing myself around. So, my bossy self told my angsty self to throw away the write-on packet and fuhgedduhboutit. For me, the potential payoff was not proportional to the amount of work that would go into it, and I don’t mean only the write-on competition. That’s just two weeks. I also mean the shit work that the 2Ls on journals do, cite checking and the like, plus you have to write a comment for potential publication, etc.

Plus, at the time I had to make this decision, I still didn’t know whether I’d been selected as a brief writer for one of the national moot court teams, and I was completely and totally sure I didn’t want to do both a journal and a moot court brief. I like legal writing a whole lot, like probably more than most normal people, who probably actually hate it. But even I have my limits, people. So I hedged my bets, dropped out of the write-on competition, and waited to hear back from the professor who selects people for the moot court teams. As you know, because you read the post, I did get selected, so in the end it worked out just peachy.

Congratulations to all my friends who made journals. You are teh awesum. And, don’t tell anybody, but I may have possibly experienced a wee bit of dropper-outer’s remorse when the announcements were made. Just a little. But I’m over it now, and I’m sure whatever residual remorse remains will be obliterated by the process of writing my moot court brief in the fall. Thanks, brain, for your sua sponte-ness.