Join Us!

Approximately 30 students join the staff of Environmental Law each year. Any law student with at least a 2.3 GPA who is entering their 2L or 3L Day or Evening academic year is welcome to join our staff. This includes students transferring from other law schools. All new members are required to attend a mandatory orientation that will take place in late August.

There are two different ways to join Environmental Law—the “grade-on” and the “citation competition.” For the “grade-on” process, after the Registrar issues rankings, which usually occurs sometime in mid-Summer, Environmental Law will send a letter to students with GPAs in the top 10-20% via email, offering them a position on our law review. The exact percentage of students that will receive offers based on their class rank will range from year to year, depending on our staffing needs and the size of the eligible class.

The other way to join Environmental Law is through the “citation competition,” which is a writing competition held at the end of the spring semester. Outside of the Registrar’s confirmation that competition participants meet the 2.3 GPA minimum requirement, the applicant’s GPA is not considered in this writing competition. A significant number of new members are selected through the citation competition each year. For detailed instructions about participating in the writing competition, please click here. Winners of the citation competition are typically announced in early August via email.

Unique to the three law reviews at Lewis and Clark, Environmental Law publishes summaries of all the environmental law cases that are decided by the Ninth Circuit. These summaries are written by a select group of five Environmental Law members, who are selected after an intra-journal competition in late August. For the competition, first-year Environmental Law members will be asked to complete a Ninth Circuit Review-specific citation competition assignment—a Ninth Circuit case summary—which will reflect the type of assignments you’ll receive as an NCR member. Ninth Circuit Review members will be selected in early September.

Ninth Circuit Review members are also required to write a paper related to a recent Ninth Circuit case during their first year on law review, and from these papers, two are selected for publication in the summer issue. Thus, Ninth Circuit Review provides a tremendous writing and editorial experience, and provides the opportunity to be published.