Not too long ago, I wrote about the tension between managing commitments and missing opportunities. I know that building one's resumé is an issue for students starting as early as high school, maybe earlier. No matter how great you really are, you probably won't get a chance to demonstrate your abilities until you have a job.

It's a strange assumption to make, that people who on a daily basis spend their time handling real responsibilities like feeding a family and maintaining human relationships are somehow less valuable as employees. But that's precisely what employers in general, and law firms in particular, assume. They don't want to talk about your brilliant paper or your work ethic or how your deep understanding of public policy makes you a better lawyer than that schmuck who crammed for finals and forgot everything the moment he saw his 3.9 GPA. They want awards, they want clubs, they want an impossibly high GPA, and they want co-curriculars.

They want Law Review.

At any University, the Law Review is the place to be. It's an academic journal, a place for lofty analysis of legal principles, the kind that judges cite in their opinions. You want a judicial clerkship? Get on the Law Review. Biglaw employment? Law Review. Maybe you want to teach? Law Review again. Editing for the Law Review requires hours upon hours of challenging and often tedious work. But you don't just want it on your resumé. You need it.

I want to edit for the Law Review. At the end of this semester, I will be required to write a casenote and do a technical edit. My performance will determine whether I am invited to participate. For my peers in the top 10% of the class, their performance is irrelevant; they get to participate more or less by default.

I want to edit for the Law Review because I am an academic. Editing articles, analyzing them, writing about them, discussing things from a deeply philosophical perspective, it's what I do.

So imagine my frustration to hear, day after day, from student after student, that they are going to try to get on Law Review, even though they don't really want to. They don't want to do the work to join and they're not interested in doing the work it requires. So...

"Why would you bother?" I ask, feigning ignorance. "It's a lot of work, and if it's not your thing, it's an awful lot of misery."

"Yeah, but I want a judicial clerkship."

"Yeah, but I want it on my resumé."

"Yeah, but employers really like to see it."

A friend of mine suggested this is a lot like young LDS men who serve missions because that's something girls look for in a husband. "Does it not occur to them that it's not the mission they want, but the kind of guy who wants to serve a mission? The kind of guy who values and learns from that experience?"

Indeed. I have no doubt that some of my peers will learn that they really love Law Review, despite their present reluctance. And after all, isn't resumé padding the name of the game? Why should my personal abilities and desires set me apart from my money-grubbing peers? And just what's wrong with money-grubbing, anyhow?

Sorry, I should dial back the cynicism a bit I guess. I'm in jack-borrowing mode. But if I don't make Law Review, I will be angry because someone who is just in it for their resumé will have prevented me from doing something I'm genuinely interested in. And if I do make the Law Review, I will have to deal with people who are not genuinely interested in helping me make the Law Review something great.

Is this the price an industry pays for garnering high wages? The IT industry was much the same in the 1990's (maybe it still is). People who can't really do the job flock to it, ushered by the invisible hand of economics...

But this is turning into a rant. I made it to the semi-final round in the 1L Moot Court competition, so maybe I'll focus on oration instead of editing. In the meantime, there's one more consequence of resumé-obsessed hiring practices. The resumés themselves stop representing the people who write them, focusing on manufactured achievements instead of actual interests and abilities. They turn into something altogether less meaningful.