The Law Review Article Submission Process:

The arrival of March 1 means that it’s peak law review submission season, and I am happy to have just finished submitting my latest article, Rethinking Searches and Seizures in a Digital World. I’m pretty excited about the article — it asks and answers a number of big questions in the field of criminal procedure that are beginning to come up a lot but no one has written about yet. I think the article ‘clicks’ pretty nicely.

  Having blogged at length about the law review article submission process, I thought some readers might be interested to know what approach I chose. On the paper vs. electronic submissions question, I ended up mailing paper copies to most of the journals on my list. I submitted electronic copies to the journals that encouraged them, however, including the main law reviews of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, Penn, and Cornell. The electronic submission process was relatively easy, although some journals have better interfaces than others. For example, I couldn’t tell if the upload at Columbia was successful (although I later received an e-mail indicating it was), and both Stanford and Penn required you to write down your tracking/ID number rather than just send it to you via e-mail. It also occurs to me that it’s pretty easy to accidentally upload the wrong file; I doubt most journals will contact you if you accidentally upload a cover letter file rather than the actual paper. Paper submissions let you confirm that everything that should be in the envelope is in there; the current electronic forms do not.

  There has been a lot of attention recently on the length of law review articles. I was able to trim my article to a relatively compact 21,659 words, which will probably translate to about 45 journal pages. That’s well under the 25,000 line that a number of journals are monitoring, although not quite at the 20,000 mark that the Virgina Law Review prefers (see this post for some details). If the top law reviews hadn’t announced their interest in shorter articles the piece probably would have been in the neighborhood of 25,000-27,000 words; I ended up cutting the piece down by going through it line by line and taking out what seemed interesting but non-essential. It made for a stronger article, I think. (For some interesting insights into why this may be easier in some fields and harder in others, see this post from UCLA law prof Vic Fleischer.)

  One thing journals might keep in mind is that the new focus on article length should push journals to clarify their length policies for articles versus essays. Some law reviews allow authors to choose whether they wish to submit their pieces as (full-length) articles or (generally shorter) essays; my sense is that at most of these journals there are distinct article-selecting teams depending on which option authors choose. Given that, the journals should be clear about what kind of word length they expect for articles versus essays; otherwise authors don’t really know which category to choose. Some journals have clear policies, but others don’t.