The Scribes Law-Review Award is presented at the annual meeting of the National Conference of Law Reviews, which is usually held in March or April.
Law-Review Award
Overview
Since 1987, Scribes has presented an annual award for the best student-written article in a law review or journal. The Scribes Law-Review Award is presented at the annual meeting of the National Conference of Law Reviews, which is usually held in March or April.
Article submissions are usually due to Scribes in February. Once we receive all the submissions, we send them to law professors for an initial judging. Once that group has selected the top 10 or articles, they go to the Law-Review-Award committee. They read each article, deliberate, and choose a winner.
The professors and the committee members judge each article on these four criteria:
Quality of writing: The writing should be clean, direct, and engaging. /50
Topic: The topic should be timely and interesting. /20
Research: The research should be thorough, showing a passion for the topic, not just superficial research. /20
Footnotes: The article should have few to no talking footnotes. /10
Professor Joseph Kimble, longtime Scribes member and legal-writing guru, wrote detailed criteria for writing law-review articles that are clear, succinct, and foreceful -- part of Scribes mission. You may download his criteria here.
To submit an entry, please email scribeslegalwriters@gmail.com for more information and to receive an entry form.