Christina Luk ‘21
Editor-in-Chief
The University of Virginia School of Law’s journal tryout program has always been unique from journal tryouts at other schools. For one thing, we have a unified tryout that all journals, including the Virginia Law Review, use to select its members. Most schools have a separate tryout for each journal or one tryout for specialty journals and another for law review. Second, our tryout, as 1Ls may have noticed, happens in the middle of the Spring semester. Our peer schools, on the other hand, throw their 1Ls into the crucible immediately after spring finals, which is a bit like asking someone to run a marathon after a friendly triathlon. My favorite thing about the our tryout program though, and arguably the best thing about it, is that it only takes a single weekend. Unlike the one to two week long ordeal that our peers at other schools suffer, our tryout is quick if not easy.
However, this year, the Journal Tryout is taking place across two weekends instead of one. According to Jess Feinberg ’21, outgoing Membership & Inclusion Editor for VLR and the Tryout Administrator, the reason is two-fold. First, the move to two weekends is in good faith meant to relieve stress and to allow for more breaks and flexibility. The second half of the tryout gives a full three days (Friday-Sunday) for the writing component, a change that encourages students to take breaks. Second, that built-in extra time will hopefully help folks with special accommodations to spend up to twice as long on the tryout, whose final day overlaps with Wednesday classes.
1Ls will work on the Editing Component the first weekend, capped at eight cumulative hours, and they will have the second weekend for the Writing Component, which requires them to read 250 pages of materials or fewer and write an eight page paper. 2Ls and 3Ls will note that this is both a shorter writing assignment and a lighter reading load—a twenty and seventy page reduction from last year and the year before, respectively. On top of these changes, 1Ls will be allowed for the first time in Tryout history to use the searchable online Bluebook.
Other major changes include a revamp of the Journal Tryout Toolkit, a comprehensive PDF of important dates, rules, and information about the tryout process and the participating journals. The biggest change from last year is an expanded table of contents and the inclusion of new “checklists” to help 1Ls keep track of the many moving parts in the Tryout. There is an Honor Code Checklist for the confidentiality rules and one checklist each for the Editing and Writing Components. The Toolkit this year also features “Easy Access Materials” at the beginning of the packet for easy reference.
These and other changes were made in response to feedback solicited from last year’s participants. When asked what the most common complaints were, Feinberg commented, “Most of the feedback was about very discrete things, like how the Honor Code Rules were scattered throughout the Toolkit, which is why they’ve been collected as a Checklist this year.” Thinking on the feedback a little more, Feinberg shared that a number of people really enjoyed the topic from last year, “which was great news, and something I’m trying for again this year.”
Other changes have been more subtle. For example, this year’s Toolkit has more information about VLR’s Holistic Review, the process by which half of VLR’s new members are chosen. According to the Toolkit, seven VLR members will sit on the Member Selection Committee, which decides on new members by considering their Editing Component scores, Writing Component scores, personal statement, and very limited grade information. The selection happens across three rounds, and limited grade information is provided about the fifty finalists. When asked about the new inclusion, Feinberg responded that it was in the interest of transparency. “In the past,” she shared, “not knowing how the Holistic Review process works gave students a lot of stress. And since we already shared a lot of the same information with 2Ls last spring, when we found out the semester would be pass/fail, it makes sense to just be transparent about it moving forward.”
So who exactly makes these changes? There is a Unified Journal Tryout Committee composed of the heads of each journal, and this committee usually makes decisions. Due to the pandemic, however, and the Office of Student Affairs’ reluctance to involve too many students before an official decision was made about Spring Break, Feinberg worked with Dean Davies to come up with a contingency plan that eventually became the current tryout process. As for the Toolkit, Feinberg spent over twenty hours tweaking, rewriting, updating, and reorganizing the document over Winter Break. And she has made major strides in improving the document. Having personally read the Toolkits from all three years (why), I can assure the 1Ls that this is the most readable one to date. Plus, there are all these nifty new hyperlinks that make the document especially navigable.
For the 1Ls who are about to embark on the tryout process, Feinberg had this advice to give. As the outgoing Membership & Inclusion Editor, she encouraged everyone to submit a personal statement to VLR. She shared, “I wasn’t sure when I was writing mine what VLR was looking for. I can’t speak to what this year’s Membership Selection Committee will do, but I can say that last year, we looked for the perspective you would bring to help us round out the journal and for people we would want to work with. You don’t need to write about saving the world. Just give us something honest and authentic.” Feinberg also had more general advice as the Tryout Administrator. For those of you only using the online bluebook, Feinberg recommends putting in the effort to read through the rules and to perhaps take handwritten notes as an alternative to tabbing it—whatever will help you familiarize yourself with the rules. As for the writing component, "there’s an abundance of time, take breaks, it’s not the same gauntlet anymore!”
It’s undeniable that this year’s Journal Tryout will be different. It’s also undeniable that a lot of thought and care have gone into these changes. Whether or not all these changes are here to stay will depend on feedback from this year’s tryout, to be collected in a survey sent out later this spring. So to all the Tryout participants this year, I wish you good luck!
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cl3eh@virginia.edu