Women rise to top spots in Law School

Catherine Behan News Office For the first time, two women will be at the helm of the Law Review journal next year.

Britt Guerrina, the new Editor-in-Chief, and Teresa Goebel, the new Executive Editor, will be third-year students in the Law School.

In recent years, women have gained increasingly prominent roles at the nation's top law schools. Next year, the chief editors at Harvard and Yale's law reviews also will be women.

"It's great to see that a lot of women in our class are doing very well," Guerrina said.

Law reviews are student-edited journals of faculty and student legal research. At Chicago, the top 18 students are appointed to theLaw Reviewbased on their grades at the end of their first year. Ten others are appointed based on a writing competition.

Those appointed serve as staff editors in their second year, and the outgoing board of graduating third-years appoint the top editors for the following year. Guerrina and Goebel are currently working with the outgoing editorial board on the issue that will be released this summer.

Appointment to the Law Review is considered one of the top honors for a law student and can be influential when embarking on a career. "Being on the Law Review opens up a lot of opportunities we wouldn't otherwise have," Guerrina said.

Guerrina and Goebel said while there has not been a particular push to have more women in the top editing spots, women have had increasingly prominent roles on the Law Review during the past five years. A woman first headed the Law Review in the late 1980s, and next year, women will hold the top spots in two of three Law School student publications: the Legal Forum as well as the Law Review

"It's great to see women running the journals," said David Strauss, the Harry N. Wyatt Professor in the Law School and faculty advisor to the Law Review. "It was just a matter of time."

After their year in the Law Review's top spots, Guerrina (A.B.'90, A.M.'90), is considering a career in international or public-interest law, and Goebel, who received her B.A. from Brown in 1994, is planning to head into corporate law. Prior to starting Law School, Guerrina worked with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services at the Head Start bureau, and Goebel was a financial analyst at Paine Webber in New York.