Hometown: New Jersey
Education: Boston University 2013
Affiliations: Editor-in-Chief of California Law Review
Editor’s note: In legal academia, most scholarship is published not in peer review journals, but by students in law review journals. California Law Review (CLR) is the flagship law review at Berkeley.
Legal scholarship that is published in a law review, particularly at a top law school, can have a huge influence. It can show up on the desks of judges and professors and policymakers. Professors who submit articles for publication in law reviews are at the forefront of their specialty and research in that area. Because of this, law review articles are often looked to for legal reform.
CLR has a huge amount of potential to influence the law, and it’s amazing that law students get to be the gatekeepers of the types of ideas that get disseminated into the world. We don’t want to create an echochamber of scholarship that only legal scholars are reading. We look for articles that are going to have an impact and will affect a lot of people and everyday issues outside of academia.
We have 131 members and publish six times a year, each issue has about seven pieces in it. So we’re basically running a full-time publishing house. I ran for Editor-in-Chief because I was excited by the opportunity to manage a big team that can have a real influence on the legal world. I’m also just inspired by the people I work with. My peers are some of the smartest people I’ve ever met and they have these big ideas about the direction of the law and legal profession and I really enjoy being in a position to help them achieve their goals. Learning how to run a large organization that is accountable to the legal community at a high level is a huge responsibility. It has been an honor and privilege to lead it.