Undergraduate Law Review launches

The Princeton Undergraduate Law Review published its first collection of articles online on Feb. 16.

Anthony Sibley ’16, the former president of the Pre-Law Society, said he reached out to Mengyi Xu ’13, a former Program of Law and Public Affairs co-director and Pre-Law Society president, about the idea.

Since the Pre-Law Society’s founding in 2008, the concept of a publication for the organization had never been fully developed, Xu explained.

The Editorial Board consists of Editor-in-Chief Charlotte Chun ’16, Ella Cheng ’16, Carol Gu ’17, Martha Jachimski ’17and Selena Kitchens ’17.

Chun is a former columnist and Cheng is a former staff writer for The Daily Princetonian.

“It just so happened that the entirety of the PULR board is female, which is something that I have personally taken a lot of pride in,” Chun said. “We just all come from different backgrounds but all have leadership experience in our own way, and came together more as peers, I would say, than a hierarchical structure."

The journal is run solely by undergraduates and contains only content written by undergraduates, Chun explained. However, she added that the absence of a law school at the University and associated faculty limits advising and fact-checking opportunities for writers.

“We sort of tried to come up with a unique system of our own, working with what we have and sort of maximizing on giving the writers as much autonomy as possible,” she said.

The Editorial Board does not determine the content matter of the journal and allows students to explore any legal issue they are interested in, Gu said.

Other on-campus publications did not serve as models or inspiration for the PULR, Chun noted.

“While it is very inspirational to see a lot of academic journals emerge on campus, I had personally looked into a lot of other undergraduate law reviews and seen how they had conducted their publication," she said.

At a LAPA event, Wilson School professor Kim Lane Scheppele said the most effective medium for PULR to be accessible would be to publish it online, Chun said.

Get the best of ‘the Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

Scheppele did not respond for a request to comment.

The online format allows for the gradual publication of blog posts, rather than a quarterly publication deadline where all at once the material is let out to the public, Chun said.

Future goals, Chun and Gu said, include expansion and continuing to incite discussion among University students, as well as making the website interactive to enable debate.

Omid Abrishamchian ’18 saidPULR had provided him with an opportunity to explore the law more deeply than he would normally have been able to do at the University.

"The ultimate goal was to expand the community that we had discussing legal issues and the law, and sort of group more people in, and to also create more of an inclusive environment as opposed to one that is just exclusive to pre-law students,” Chun said.

Jonathan Cortez ’16, co-president of the Pre-Law Society, said he expected the law review to appeal especially to members of his organization.

“As a society, we try to strive beyond just being an organization, and we want to engage minds that are interested in law, in the legal field, both to educate themselves and to encourage exploration in the field, and we feel that the law review is an excellent way of doing that,” he said.“I don’t know if there was necessarily a demand for a law review ... but hopefully now that we have one, people will recognize the merits of having one, and maybe there will be more a demand for one coming in the future.”

Clarification: This article has been updated to reflect that Chun is a former columnist for the 'Prince.'