Prospective Members

This page is designed to answer some very broad questions about the FIU Law Review—what it is, what it does, and what that means for you. This page is arranged as a FAQ. If you have additional questions or don’t understand what you just read, please feel free to contact us so we can provide an answer for you.

What Is The FIU Law Review?: The FIU Law Review is a student-run organization that edits and publishes works of legal scholarship. These scholarly works are submitted to our organization by professionals, academics, and FIU College of Law Students.

The Law Review is run by an editorial board of third-year students who oversee and prepare editing projects done by a staff of second-year associate members. These projects are then placed in a journal and published. The Law Review currently publishes two journals a year, a Spring/Summer journal and a Fall/Winter journal. Each journal contains a number of works written about a particular symposium topic, and a few of the best student comments from the prior year’s associate members.

Why Would I Want To Join The FIU Law Review?: Law Review is generally recognized as one of the most prestigious organizations a law student can have on his or her resume. Many top employers will not even interview a student without Law Review credentials, so it is important for students with an interest in being recruited out of law school to have law review experience.

Aside from its cachet with employers, the law review experience is also valuable for its less tangible benefits. One of the best ways to hone your legal writing skills is by editing the work of others. You will have ample opportunity to do this as a member of the FIU Law Review. In addition, you will be exposed to a completely different kind of writing. At FIU, our legal skills and values program focuses almost exclusively on writing for practice; there is really no other opportunity in law school to get experience writing and editing academic and scholarly works, which make up a big part of the legal profession. Law review experience fills that void in two ways: (1) by giving you the opportunity to edit and proofread the work of scholars in the field, and (2) by giving you the opportunity—as an associate member—to produce your own work of legal scholarship.

In addition, Law Review will offer you the chance to collaborate with some of the brightest students at FIU. There is a sense of community that comes with being on the law review, and it is one of the few places where students have an opportunity to teach and learn from one another without too much involvement from the faculty.

What Kind Of Work Can I Expect While I Am On The FIU Law Review?: The demands are different depending on whether you are a second-year Associate Member (“AM”) or a third year editor. As an AM, you will generally have three to five articles and one to two comments a year that you will edit as part of a team. You will also have to write your comment, which is a scholarly work that needs to be a minimum of 50 pages and 270 footnotes. You have all year to write the comment, but the FIU Law Review requires you to turn in drafts so your editors can keep track of your progress and steer you on the right path. There will probably be one draft due at the end of your fall semester and two more due in the spring.

All in all, if you commit about 10-15 hours a week to Law Review work, you should be able to meet all of your deadlines with no problem and have plenty of time to do the rest of your work. Law review is like anything else, of course, if you procrastinate: the work tends to collect on itself.

What Kind Of Credit Can I Get For Being On The FIU Law Review?: Second-year associate members get two ungraded credits for their law review work, which they can take in the fall or spring semester of their second year. Third-year editors get two credits per semester. This means that if a person were to do two years of law review—as a second-year associate member and as a third-year editor—they would receive a total of six ungraded credit (which is also the maximum amount a student can have). The Faculty Advisory Committee is ultimately in charge of who receives credit for their work, but it has rarely become an issue where a student has been productive.

How Can I Get On The FIU Law Review?: There are two ways to get on the FIU Law Review. The first is by grading on and the second is by writing on.

Grading on. This option is available to the top two students from both the day and night classes at the conclusion of their core curricula. For night students, this is computed at the conclusion of the fall semester of their second year, so top night students can be secure in the knowledge that they have earned a spot without having to write on. For day students, however, the write on competition is ordinarily scheduled before grades for the spring semester are available. Students can either take the risk that their grades will carry through and allow them to grade on, or they can participate in the write-on competition.

Writing on. This option is available to all FIU students in good academic standing. The write-on competition is divided into two parts. The first part is an examination that tests your knowledge of the Bluebook. Because it is an open-book exam and you have four days to do it, however, you will probably find that the exam is designed more to familiarize you with the Bluebook than test you on it. This will come in handy for the second part: the Casenote. This assignment asks you to write an essay on a particular case that has recently been decided. The essay has to be at least 10 pages long and must contain at least 75 endnotes. Because you have three days total to research and write the essay, time management for this assignment becomes half the challenge.

How Many People Do You Accept On The FIU Law Review Each Year?: There is no set number of people accepted by the FIU Law Review each year. Instead, the number of admittees is based strictly on the quality of the submissions. Editorial boards in the past have accepted as few as 10 and as many as 21 applicants.

Can I Submit My Work To The FIU Law Review For Publication?: Not as a student, and probably not as a practitioner. The only way FIU students can get published in the FIU Law Review is by writing a comment as a second-year Associate Member and having that comment selected for publication.