Sunday, August 26, 2012

ABA Criminal Justice Section Staff Writer Position

Please see the message below regarding a potential staff writer position with the ABA's Criminal Justice Section Young Lawyers Committee:
 
The ABA's Criminal Justice Section has just started a new committee: the Young Lawyers Committee. One of our Committee's new initiatives is to publish a quarterly newsletter targeted toward law students and lawyers in their first five years of practice. I will be serving as Co-chair of the Committee and also as the newsletter's Editor. For each issue, I would like to include a quarterly review of criminal opinions issued by the various federal circuits. Specifically, I would like to publish a "case summary" for each opinion, organized by circuit.

I am seeking several volunteer law students who would serve as "Staff Writers" for this project. These students would be responsible for monitoring the opinions issued by the particular circuit(s) to which they would be assigned. For each opinion that impacts criminal law, the writer would prepare a summary of the relevant facts and the holding of the case. Summaries should be approximately one paragraph long, with reasonable leeway for more complicated opinions.

I would like for you to prepare a mass email that you can send to your contacts to solicit interested persons. Forwarding this email would certainly be appropriate. One idea would be to contact the career coordinator for the ABA-accredited law schools who could then forward the message to his/her student body. I will leave the logistics to your discretion.

To apply, I have attached a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision. Applicants should review the case and prepare a case summary as described above. The summary should then be emailed directly to me at mddeanlaw@gmail.com. I will contact the applicants who have been selected shortly thereafter. I would like all submissions emailed to me no later than October 15, 2012.

Please contact me with any questions you may have.

Thanks,

Michael D. Dean
Co-chair
Young Lawyers Committee
Criminal Justice Section
American Bar Association