HONORS PROGRAMS

The school has four honors programs which 2Ls and 3Ls can participate in:

• Southern California Law Review
• Interdisciplinary Law Journal ("ILJ")
  
• Review of Law and Women's Studies ("RLAWS")
  
• Hale Moot Court

Towards the end of the spring semester, you will be asked to rank the honors programs in the order you would like to participate in them. Based on this ranking and the respective factors considered by each Honors Program (qualifying mock trial round and your brief for Moot Court and the Write-On competition and grades for the journals), you'll be assigned to a particular honors program. You will be assigned to the highest-ranked program for which you are eligible.

Your chances: Each program is open to roughly 35-40 2Ls. So anywhere from 140 to 160 students could potentially participate in an honors program during their second-year. Given that there will be many students who will choose not to participate in any program, virtually any student will have the chance to be in one of the programs regardless of grades. Therefore, I would not let grades dissuade you from trying to join an honors program. Granted, if you don't do so well, you probably won't make Law Review, but there are three other programs that you'll have a good shot at.

MOOT COURT

It is mandatory to participate in the qualifying rounds for the Moot Court Honors Program -- it is a part of the Legal Writing course.

There are two rounds which you must participate in: The first round is a practice round which has no value in determining whether you make the program -- but you do get feedback from the judges from the following round. The second round is the qualifying round in which your performance is evaluated by the judges for admission into the program.

For each round, you need to be ready for about 15 minutes of oral argument. The majority of the round will be spent responding to judges' questions rather than reciting your pre-planned argument. The oral argument and the judges' questions will be based on the brief you have to write this semester for Legal Writing. Also, there is a closed universe of cases for the rounds -- so there's only a particular number of cases you need to know.

The judges are current members of the Moot Court and take great joy in grilling first-years during their qualifying rounds. The quality of your brief (for Legal Writing) is also considered in your evaluation.

If you are interested in doing Moot Court, here are a few tips for the qualifying rounds:

• dress up for the qualifying rounds
• practice: have 2Ls and 3Ls in the program right now "moot" you, i.e., put you through an actual practice round.
  
• know the case law: the better you know the cases the more you'll be able to handle the judge's questions.
• deference: address everyone as "your honor" and direct your answers to ALL the judges, not just the one who asked the question. And always answer whatever questions the judges ask, whether you think it's relevant or not.
• transition smoothly: the judges will interject with questions at will and won't give you any indication that they're done questioning, you'll just find that things get really quiet. At that point, you need to transition back into your prepared argument, but, ideally, do so coherently.
  

Basically, what you want to do is (a) convey a commanding knowledge of the relevant case law, (b) present a convincing argument for your client (try to get across your key points when you're not being questioned and in answering the judges (i.e., have an agenda and get it across one way or another)) and (c) not get trapped by the judges (i.e., allow them to make you contradict an argument you made earlier in the round)

If you make it to the Moot Court honors program, the bulk of the work is done in the Fall. You will be given the case or the fact pattern for the year's competition. The first step is to write a brief for one of the sides.

Units: for Moot Court you get 3 units during the Fall and 0 units during the Spring.

If you would like to be put in touch with a current member of Moot Court, either for more information or to set up a practice "moot" round, you can contact me at: bleiweis@usc.edu

THE JOURNALS

The journals are usually ranked as follows in terms of prestige:

1. Law Review
2. ILJ
3. RLAWS

I would say that, from an employer's perspective, Law Review is most prestigious and the other two are equal.

The Write-On: There is a write-on competition to get on the journals -- unlike moot court, this competition is optional. After your last final (Thursday, May 11, 2006), the Law Review Executive Notes Editor will be waiting for all interested participants with 100-plus page packet which will (a) explain the competition, (b) explain each journal's admission criteria and (c) contain all the sources for the write-on.

Basically, you will be given a fact pattern and be asked to write a 10-page law-journalesque article, with blue-booked endnotes, in response to a particular question based on a closed universe of sources which will include cases, law review articles and popular media pieces. You will be judged on coherence and quality of your argument, your use of the available sources and your bluebooking. You have two weeks to complete the write-on (it'll usually be due on a Friday (you can either turn it in by a certain hour or have it post-marked by this day)-- I'm guessing May 26).

Note: blue-booking for the Write-On, and law journals generally, is substantially different than the blue-booking done for briefs and memos. So, a portion of the two weeks will be dedicated to learning how to bluebook for journals. Closer to the date, I will post up the key differences that you should worry about.

Once you turn in the write-on, it will be reviewed by the relevant editors of all the journals you have ranked on your preference form. In conjunction with the write-on, the editors will look at your grades. The further up you go on the "prestige" rankings, the more grades matter. So, for Law Review, grades matter alot. But it is not the case that someone with excellent grades (e.g., top 10% is guaranteed a spot on Law Review). In other words, you still need to turn in a solid write-on even if you're at the top of the class. But, at the same time, if you're in the middle of the class, it is much much harder to get on Law Review.

If you make it to a journal, during your 2L year you will be part of the general staff. You'll have the following responsibilities:

1. Editing Articles: for each assignment, you will be given a number of footnotes to check (Law Review staff can get up to 50 footnotes an assignment whereas the staff on other journals usually get around 5). You're responsible for
   
• checking the blue-booking of the footnotes,
  
• editing the content or text of the article for grammar, wording, etc.
• you have to check that any proposition cited in a source actually exists in that source as it is cited (this is called cite-checking).
  
• for example: if the author quotes a portion of an opinion, you need to look up the opinion and make sure that the quote was reproduced accurately.
  
2. Collections: in order to facilitate cite-checking, it helps to have all the sources cited by a particular article in the law journal office. For a collection, you'll be given particular sources (cases, articles, books, etc.) to bring back to the office. Sometimes the sources are already in the office, sometimes they're at the law library, sometimes somewhere else on campus and sometimes you'll have to trek out to UCLA or some other place to find the source. In short, collections are alot of fun.
   
3. Article Evaluation: to help the editors pick the best articles to publish, the staff occasionally gets to review articles submitted by authors for publication in the journal. This usually involves reading over the article and filling out an evaluation form.
   

Also, every staff member has to write a Note during the spring semester of their 2L year. A Note is simply a student-written law journal article. You can write about anything you want, as long as you can find a faculty advisor willing to sign off on it (and you'll get to come up with cool titles for your Note, such as Cars and Effect: Affective Forecasting in California Litigation). Your advisor will (theoretically) guide you through the research and writing process and eventually give you a grade on your note.

Units: You get 3 graded units (based on your Note) and 2 ungraded units. On a law journal you get 2 units in the Fall and 3 in the Spring.