>- He was give the position to run the Harvard Law Review, despite having never been formally published. This is "almost" unheard of.
>
>As someone who has been writing for periodicals for over a decade and has studied the magazine industry since my teens, the idea of giving that level of responsibility in legal journalism to someone who never penned content for the group....well, that's like an inexperienced amateur being voted in as president of a country. Oh, wait....
Do you have evidence for your assertions here? FWIW, here's how the NY Times covered his election as editor:
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/02/06/us/first-black-elected-to-head-harvard-s-law-review.htmlNothing there about it being unprecedented for him not to have been published. In fact, they explicitly say that the tradition had been for the student with the highest GPA to be editor, and that it had recently changed.
From the Wikipedia article on HLR:
Since the change of criteria in the 1970s, grades are no longer the primary basis of selection for editors. Membership in the Harvard Law Review is offered to select Harvard law students based on first-year grades and performance in a writing competition held at the end of the first year except for twelve slots that are offered on a discretionary basis.[13][14][15] The writing competition includes two components: an edit of an unpublished article and an analysis of a recent United States Supreme Court or Court of Appeals case.[13] The writing competition submissions are graded blindly to assure anonymity.[15][16] Fourteen editors (two from each 1L section) are selected based on a combination of their first-year grades and their competition scores. Twenty editors are selected based solely on their competition scores. The remaining twelve editors are selected on a discretionary basis. According to the law review's webpage, "Some of these discretionary slots may be used to implement the Review's affirmative action policy."[13] The president of the Harvard Law Review is elected by the other editors.[14][17]
Tamar
