Law Students at NYU ‘Demand Compensation for Academic Journal Work’
“There’s this expectation, not just at NYU, that you’re coming to this law school and doing a bunch of work just essentially for prestige and for grounding your future career”
Isn’t the idea that the students are compensated with learning? Am I missing something here?
Washington Square News reports:
NYU Law students demand compensation for academic journal work
Students at NYU’s School of Law are demanding compensation for their work on student-run journals — scholarly publications affiliated with the law school that focus on legal issues. The students created a petition with over 250 signatures in support of the cause, and eight on-campus publications signed a letter to law school administrators this past Monday.
In the letter, students asked that all contributors to the journals be able to choose whether to receive compensation in hourly wages or credit hours. Currently, only third-year students are eligible for compensation through credit hours, and no students receive hourly pay.
“We love our work, but prestige is not adequate compensation for the value we provide,” the letter reads. “Our journals have been cited in courts throughout the country, up to the Supreme Court. NYU reaps the benefits of robust journal publication in admissions and institutional prestige.”
Sean Connolly, a second-year law student and an editor for one of the journals, and Devin McCowan, a third-year who edits a different journal, said that NYU Law administration has acknowledged the letter, but has yet to address student compensation.
Connolly also claimed that other universities, like the University of Pennsylvania and Vanderbilt University, give credit hours for all student work on journals. He said that if students are able to secure hourly wages, NYU Law would be the first law school to provide financial compensation for this type of work.
“There’s this expectation, not just at NYU, that you’re coming to this law school and doing a bunch of work just essentially for prestige and for grounding your future career,” Connolly said. “That’s kind of the logic we’re trying to change, this idea that all the work you’re doing in law school is stressful, uncompensated and you should just like go to law school, get a bunch of debt, do a bunch of work, and then ‘it’s fine, because you’ll get a job later.’”
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. “That’s kind of the logic we’re trying to change, this idea that all the work you’re doing in law school is stressful, uncompensated and you should just like go to law school, get a bunch of debt, do a bunch of work, and then ‘it’s fine, because you’ll get a job later.’”
Doesn’t every person going to university have the same problem? If you are unhappy, find a different path in life, it is that simple. You want the prestige without the work? Snowflake.
NBD. If they insist on getting paid for formerly free work, they can get in line behind the go-getter students who are still willing to work for free, or at least for less.
This is what happens when you are raised on the mantra that nothing in life should cause you stress at any point in your life
So, they wanna make tacit contract terms explicit and renegotiate. That’s fun to watch when both sides have been grifting the other. Comes out when their little scam is under outside pressure — less demand, competing services, other gatekeepers want it, etc.
/moar popcorn
Law students are free to lobby the state legislatures or Congress for changes to the minimum wage laws. Currently work on academic journals are exempted from such laws.
Why limit this claim to just academic journals? Law students spend time organizing Federalist Society events, “DEI Workshops”, legal aid clinics, and more. Have them all keep time cards and pay them minimum wage.
Oh, and then increase law school tuition by a corresponding amount.
If *all* the work they do in law school is stressful perhaps they’d do better in a different career.
Why are law journals edited by students anyway? In other fields journals are edited by tenured professors. It is a position of real power. Why do we let law students who haven’t proven a damn thing about themselves yet control what gets published, things usually written by their legal betters?
Their forerunners didn’t get paid so they shouldn’t either. What’s next, getting paid for doing their home work?
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It once was a position of real power, back before 1980. Serious and important student writing and outside articles by professors and sometimes even judges appeared in the leading law journals, which were edited by students who were selected by rigorous criteria (1L GPA or a writing competition, both graded blind), and judges and practitioners paid attention to what was published. I cannot speak for now other than saying that in the mid-1980s I dropped my subscription and never looked back because I found far fewer articles to be of any particular interest or enduring worth and because the student selection process had become diminished with other considerations. Today, law review seems less about power and more about the prestige that it still carries.
I guess if it’s so stressful or so unfulfilling, they could just not write articles or be editors. The idea that prestige and advancement of their careers is insufficient is laughable.