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48 J. Legal Educ. 247 (1998)
Writing a Student Article

handle is hein.journals/jled48 and id is 257 raw text is: Writing a Student Article Eugene Volokh Part of a law teacher's job is advising students who want to write publishable articles. Unfortunately, I've seen little written material that can aid us in this task. The following article, written for a student audience (originally my own advisees and members of various UCLA law journals), aims to remedy this lack. It describes only one possible approach, and many law teachers may have their own, quite likely better, views on the subjec4 but unless you've already written something like this for your students, this article might help you help them. A well-written student article can get you a high grade, a good editorial board position, and a publication credit. These credentials can in turn help get you jobs, clerkships, and-if you're so inclined-teaching posts. The experience will hone your writing, quite likely a lawyer's most important skill. And some student articles actually influence judges, lawyers, and legislators; even the U.S. Supreme Court cites student works several times each year. Writing a student article, whether as a law review note or as an independent study project, is also one of the hardest things you'll do in law school. Your nonlaw writing experience and your first-year writing class will help prepare you for it, but only partly. Creating an original scholarly work that makes a contribution to our understanding of the law is not easy. In this article I try to give some advice, based on my own writing experience, for you to mix and match with whatever other advice you get. These ideas have worked for me, and I hope they work for you. If you find this article useful, I suggest you reread it at various stages of your project; as you get further into your piece, you might find yourself profiting from some tip that you missed when you first read it) Eugene Volokh is Acting Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles. This article is part of a book-in-progress by my colleague Daniel Lowenstein and me on legal writing for second- and third-year law students. Many thanks to Alison Anderson, Paul Bergman, David Binder, Dan Bussel, Dana Gardner, Ken Graham, Ken Klee, Kris Knaplund, Nancy Levit, Dan Lowenstein, Elaine Mandel, Steve Munzer, David Sklansky, and Steve Yeazell for their advice; toJudge Alex Kozinski for a year of superb on- thejob training; and to the John M. Olin Foundation for extremely generous research support. 1. For more advice, check out Elizabeth Fajans & Mary . Falk, Scholarly Writing for Law Students: Seminar Papers, Law Review Notes, and Law Review Competition Papers (St. Paul, 1995); Richard Delgado, How to Write a Law Review Article, 20 U.S.F. L. Rev. 445 (1986). It should go without saying that when you're submitting your work for a grade, you should focus on what your faculty adviser recommends. Journal of Legal Education, Volume 48, Number 2 (June 1998)

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