Legal Commentary

How Did You Find the Idea for a Successful Student Note?

By Eugene Volokh

I?m working on the fourth edition of my Academic Legal Writing textbook, and I?d like to give students some more ideas about finding a Note topic. I already have a list of general ideas. But I thought I?d make it more vivid by giving quotes from people who had written successful Notes, and who could quickly summarize how the topic came to them.

I?d therefore like to ask: If you thought your student Note worked well for you ? helped you get a job (as a lawyer, law professor, or a law clerk), or got a bunch of citations, or won some award ? can you tell me, in a sentence or two, how you found the topic to write about? (E.g., ?I asked an experienced lawyer I knew for some advice, and he pointed me to another lawyer, a prominent academically-minded employment lawyer who was the coauthor of a practitioner treatise. She suggested that I write about free speech and workplace harassment law, a topic that was just beginning to come up in the cases, and that I likely would never have come across myself.?) My plan is to use some of the quotes without mentioning the authors? names, though naturally I would mention the names in the acknowledgments; that approach would avoid breaking up the flow of the advice, and would also avoid problems if the story is potentially mildly embarrassing to the author or someone else.

I would prefer to focus on Notes that are essentially standard articles but written by law students, and to exclude Case Notes, Recent Developments, and such.

If you could help me out with this, I?d be much obliged. Please include your name in the comment, or if you don?t want to post your name on the blog, please e-mail me your answer at volokh at law dot ucla dot edu. Thanks!

Full post as published by The Volokh Conspiracy on January 28, 2010 (boomark / email).