Third-year LSU Law student Philip Young’s article, “Ruler Coaster: Remodifying the NLRB’s Conciliating Standard for Evaluating Facially Neutral Work Rules,” placed second in The College of Labor & Employment Lawyers/ABA Section of Labor & Employment Law Annual Writing Competition for Law Students.
After Philip Young submitted an article to Louisiana Law Review that wasn’t accepted for publication last fall, his faculty advisor and senior editor encouraged him to continue working on the paper and submit it for a national writing competition.
“Joseph Kaiser was my senior editor on this paper, and I couldn’t have had a better person to encourage and guide me,” said Young, who is now in his final year of studies at the LSU Paul M. Hebert Law Center. “I can’t thank Joseph enough for all his help, and it’s kind of funny how our stories have tracked so closely.”
At the time, Kaiser had just been named the national winner of the American Bar Association’s Tort Trial & Insurance Practice-Admiralty and Maritime Law Writing Competition. Like Young, Kaiser originally submitted his article to Louisiana Law Review as a 2L and then reworked it for the ABA competition after Law Review passed on it.
“Joesph had gone to bat for me at Law Review, and both he and my faculty advisor, Professor Bill Corbett, were truly invaluable as I began looking at editing it down for the ABA competition,” said Young, a Lafayette native, husband, and father of two. “The ABA competition has a strict limit of 30 pages and my paper was originally about 45 pages, so I spent a couple months working to make it more concise and get it ready for the competition.”
In mid-September, Young received an email notifying him that his article, “Ruler Coaster: Remodifying the NLRB’s Conciliating Standard for Evaluating Facially Neutral Work Rules,” had placed second in The College of Labor & Employment Lawyers/ABA Section of Labor & Employment Law Annual Writing Competition for Law Students.
“It was awesome,” recalled Young of being notified of the award and the $1,000 prize that accompanies it. “As a student with a keen interest in practicing labor and employment law, it is profoundly meaningful for my work to be selected by the leading experts in the field. Furthermore, it is a privilege to represent LSU Law, and I am immensely grateful for the outstanding education I have received from its dedicated professors. I really want to thank Professor Corbett, again, who is just a legend in my mind. His expert knowledge and guidance were invaluable throughout my writing process.”
To the best of his memory, Corbett said Young is the only LSU Law student who has placed in this particular ABA national writing competition during his 33 years at the Law Center.
“Philip wrote an excellent article on a challenging topic under the National Labor Relations Act. His work is all the more impressive because he wrote it as a second-year law student who had not yet taken the Labor Law course,” said Corbett, who was honored by LSU this summer as one of just 36 faculty members to receive a 2024 University Faculty Award. “Philip had to do a substantial amount of background research and learning in order to write on this topic. The result was a thorough and insightful article on the standard applied by the NLRB to evaluate the lawfulness of employer rules.”
The College of Labor & Employment Lawyers/ABA Section of Labor & Employment Law Annual Writing Competition for Law Students is highly competitive, and the judging panel is “made up of some of the most respected labor and employment law attorneys in the United States and Canada,” according to the ABA.
Following his graduation next spring, Young will go to work for Kean Miller in Lafayette, where he will practice labor and employment law under the direction of LSU Law Alumni Board of Trustees Chair Robert Kallam, a Kean Miller partner and 1990 graduate of the LSU Paul M. Hebert Law Center. Young served as a summer associate for Kean Miller in Lafayette prior to the start of his final year of law school.
“Oh, we’ll probably pay for some daycare,” Young said when asked what he plans to do with the $1,000 prize money. Young and his wife, Monique, live in Lafayette with their five-year-old daughter and three-year-old son. “I would say diapers, but we just potty trained the little guy, so hopefully we’re all done with that.”
