How did you find the idea for your successful student Note?

[Volokh, Eugene]

Dear colleagues:  I'm working on the fourth edition of my Academic Legal 
Writing textbook, and I'd like to give students some more ideas about finding a 
Note topic.  I already have a list of general ideas.  But I thought I'd make it 
more vivid by giving quotes from people who had written successful Notes, and 
who could quickly summarize how the topic came to them.

I'd therefore like to ask:  If you thought your student Note worked well for 
you - helped you get your job, or got a bunch of citations, or won some award - 
can you tell me, in a sentence or two, how you found the topic to write about?  
 (E.g., "I asked an experienced lawyer I knew for some advice, and he pointed 
me to another lawyer, a prominent academically-minded employment lawyer who was 
the coauthor of a practitioner treatise.  She suggested that I write about free 
speech and workplace harassment law, a topic that was just beginning to come up 
in the cases, and that I likely would never have come across myself.")  My plan 
is to use some of the quotes without mentioning the authors' names, though 
naturally I would mention the names in the acknowledgments; that approach would 
avoid breaking up the flow of the advice, and would also avoid problems if the 
story is potentially mildly embarrassing to the author or someone else.

I would prefer to focus on Notes that are essentially standard articles but 
written by law students, and to exclude Case Notes, Recent Developments, and 
such.

If you could help me out with this, I'd be much obliged.  Many thanks,

Eugene
(Sorry if you got this twice; I also asked this on the LAWPROF list.)

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