Unlike law reviews at many other schools, the Harvard Law Review does not reserve editorships for transfer students. Instead, prospective transfer students must write the competition in the spring of their 1L year—at the same time as Harvard Law School 1Ls—and they compete directly (and on the same blind grading basis) with Harvard 1Ls for 27 to 29 of the spots on the Review (in other words, all spots besides the 14 allotted to Harvard 1Ls for whom first-year grades play a role).
As noted on the Harvard Law School website, the deadline for completing transfer application is July 15, 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.
Notwithstanding 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.
For more information about the competition, please contact Jennifer Heath by emailing lawrev@law.harvard.edu or calling 617-495-7889.
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