Prospective Transfer Students Applying for Membership

As noted on the Harvard Law School website, the deadline for completing transfer application is July 1, so many prospective transfer students will not have been accepted to HLS at the time of the writing competition in May. Many prospective applicants may not even have decided whether to apply to transfer, in part because they may not yet know their spring semester grades.

Not withstanding these uncertainties, the Review strongly encourages prospective transfer applicants to participate in the writing competition. While being selected to join the Review in no way guarantees a transfer applicant admission to Harvard Law School, it is the policy of the Review to inform the admissions office whenever a transfer student successfully gains membership on the Review.

Prospective transfer applicants may realize other benefits from participating in the writing competition, even if they ultimately are not admitted to HLS. For instance, students frequently use their case comments as writing samples in job searches. Additionally, many students find the competition to be a challenging, educational, and even fun experience.

Accordingly, the Review welcomes competition entries by all prospective transfers, and especially by those applicants who, as the Harvard Law School admissions office puts it, “placed very near the top of their first-year law class, and would have also been admitted or wait-listed as first-year students on the basis of their pre-law-school credentials” and thus have an enhanced likelihood of success in the application process.