In the past 48 hours, I've seen massive #lawtwitter takes on why law students must do law review or why they absolutely should not.

A thread on why we need to stop telling law students what they should or should not do:

Advice is important and appreciated, don't get me wrong. I made it to 3L surviving on the advice of a few close trusted people who I knew had my interests at heart.

Eventually one of those people got to know me the best and together we built a career plan my 0L summer.

Along the way though, I encountered a lot of (often unsolicited) advice, quite similar to these law review tweetstorms.

Everyone had an opinion. If I wasn't doing exactly what they did in law school, then somehow I was doing everything wrong.

All this did was chip away at my plan, instigate paranoia, and divert me off track.

I spent so many hours in my advisor's office second-guessing myself because some lawyer somewhere told me that I was committing career suicide by not doing xyz in law school. (Like law review).

It took me 2 years to learn the difference between advice and validation-seeking advice.

AKA the, if you can convince others to do what you did, then your path must have been perfect and everything you went through was worth it, advice.

Law students are guilty of giving validation-advice too. Like boasting their study methods and masquerading them as useful tips. Again, if you can convince others to outline exactly like you do, you must be doing something right.

Cue me upending my study habits all of 1L.

The point is, unless you really know the student, know their desired endgame, their path, their needs/wants, even their personality and world view, then you're not in a place to tell that student what they should or should not be doing with their legal education or career.

If anything, that "advice" might be causing significant damage behind the scenes. It just might drive an already overwhelmed law student back to their mentor's office completely shaken up because they let their guard down once, only to be reset by the words "stay the course."

Frustratingly, not even my advisor ever told me what I should or should not do these past couple years. I was given options & risks. But the decisions, even the hardest ones, were always mine to make.

To this day, I strongly believe that is the best and only kind of advice you can really give someone: trust yourself.

Times are changing. Legal education (and careers) are evolving. There's not one path nor one right way of doing anything anymore.

FWIW, I didn't do law review. It was never part of my career plan. And I'm okay with that decision because it worked for me.