{"id":54,"date":"2009-03-30T12:35:42","date_gmt":"2009-03-30T17:35:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/tbruce\/2009\/03\/30\/the-liibulletin-believe-it-or-not\/"},"modified":"2009-03-31T05:31:31","modified_gmt":"2009-03-31T10:31:31","slug":"the-liibulletin-believe-it-or-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/tbruce\/2009\/03\/30\/the-liibulletin-believe-it-or-not\/","title":{"rendered":"The LIIBULLETIN: believe it or not"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our LIIBULLETIN publication<\/a> is really two publications in one, delivered through the same e-mail channel.\u00a0 It rapidly notifies subscribers of Supreme Court decisions, usually minutes after they are handed down.\u00a0 More, it delivers sophisticated but accessible analysis of upcoming Supreme Court cases about two weeks before they are argued.\u00a0 The analyses are student-written and student-edited, and so it’s tempting to think of them (and of the LIIBULLETIN) as a kind of law review.\u00a0 That’s a little misleading, but not because the BULLETIN analyses demand any less of our students. I think it’s a different kind of experience, with unique strengths.<\/p>\n

The LIIBULLETIN is written by 30 students<\/a>. 24 are associate editors working in teams of two.\u00a0 Each of four student “managing editors” supervises three or four of these teams.\u00a0 An executive editor and editor-in-chief supervise them in turn, assigning cases to teams and performing a second review of the product. They are also responsible for a “print edition” that appears in the Federal Lawyer, the magazine of the Federal Bar Association<\/a>, which reaches all members of the Federal Bar Association, all Article 3 judges, and all members of Congress.\u00a0 Everything is aimed at producing high-quality writing and insightful analysis that remains accessible to non-lawyers.<\/p>\n

The editor-in-chief and executive editor are chosen by the LII, usually with strong input from the current editor-in-chief.\u00a0 The incoming editor-in-chief and executive editor participate in the choice of supervising (historically “managing”) editors.\u00a0 All six then run a selection process for the associate editors, which consists of a written sample and an interview process. All involved are paid a very small stipend.<\/p>\n

We ask the editors to do something hard:\u00a0 to write for the person they would be if they weren’t law students. My slogan for that approach used to be\u00a0 “write as though you were writing for your mother”.\u00a0 I quickly discovered that an amazing number of law students have mothers who are lawyers. Now I just say “write for the person you were a year ago, and for the clients you’ll have two years from now”.\u00a0 We stress that “non-lawyer” does not mean “unsophisticated”.\u00a0 Where popular writing about the Supreme Court often consists in large part of human-interest stories about the parties, we ask students to produce thoughtful discussions of cases and their implications from a legal perspective, and to try to draw out the larger, non-technical implications of what the Court may decide.<\/p>\n

This is different from law reviews in a number of ways:<\/p>\n