Did you write a seminar paper that made you especially proud this year? Consider reworking it for a legal writing contest this summer! The AccessLex Institute's Law School Scholarship Databank maintains a list of Writing Competitions, currently featuring close to 80 contests with prize amounts into the thousands of dollars. Many competitions also include publication opportunities in addition to cash prizes, making these a great opportunity to share your work with a wider audience.
Most listed competitions fall into the "up to $5,000" range, but some extend beyond that – such as the Judge John R. Brown Scholarship Foundation’s Brown Award for Excellence in Legal Writing, for which the first-place winner receives $15,000 (and four more finalists also receive cash prizes). That particular competition does require a faculty letter of recommendation along with the submission, so you’d have to work quickly to make it into consideration before the May 30 deadline.
Other competitions include geographic restrictions, require transcripts, or are limited to students with particular attributes (such as only for JD-enrolled students, or for U.S. citizens/legal residents, or students over a specified age). Most competitions include some topical restrictions and length requirements. The Databank allows searching and sorting by criteria like deadline, prize amount, topic, and location restrictions, so be sure to review the list and access the awarding organization’s official page for full contest rules and submission information.
For help turning your class papers into publication-ready submissions, check out titles in the library collection like Eugene Volokh's textbook Academic Legal Writing, Fajans and Falk's Scholarly Writing for Law Students, and Coughlin et al's Modern Legal Scholarship. For help locating these or other academic legal writing titles, be sure to Ask a Librarian.