The Law Review Submission Process: Tips, Tricks, and Quandaries

You hear that outside? Those fireworks mean that we're already into July and the summer submission cycle is less than a month away!

For those writing legal scholarship, it's time to start polishing, revising, or (if you thrive under pressure) writing. Law journals open for their summer submission cycle around the beginning of August (though some upstarts like the Yale Law Journal open earlier). Before long, the game of submissions, expedites, and email refreshing will begin.

This post addresses the law review submission process--focusing on strategies, tips, and related debates over the best approach to securing a good placement. Unlike some of my earlier discussions of the law review submission process, I'll steer clear of whether it's good or bad (though I do think it can be less terrible with a bit of effort). Instead, this is written with the status quo in mind, and how authors can best play the game under the existing rules. 

All of this is based on my own experience--largely in the last few years of submitting. While I haven't been in academia all that long, I've written a lot during that time on a variety of subjects. This includes submission seasons when I've submitted quite a few pieces at once--giving me the opportunity to compare how articles on different topics are treated by journals during the same cycle. It's not an experience that I recommend, unless one wants to multiply the stress level of a single submission by however many articles that are out in the mix. But it's given me some insight!

When to Submit?

One endless debate among authors is when one should submit to law reviews. Should authors give up on summer submissions and wait until the Spring? Should authors submit on the first day the cycle opens, or should they wait a week or even two?

On the spring vs. summer debate, I've had decent luck with summer submissions. Those who claim that August is a hopeless time for placements exaggerate. Still, journal space is more limited in the summer, and some journals don't even open at all. Even journals that proclaim to hold robust summer submission seasons tend to accept a strong majority of articles in the spring cycle. Authors shouldn't count the summer out--but those who don't find placements in August would do well to resubmit in the spring. 

As for whether to submit on the first day of the cycle versus submitting later, there's certainly a case for submitting as soon as possible. Most journals accept submissions on a rolling basis, and once the volume is full, they're done. Journals also tend to seek some diversity in subject matter. For example, once they've accepted one or two criminal law pieces, they're unlikely to accept additional criminal law articles absent exceptional circumstances. All of this suggests that submitting sooner, rather than later, is ideal.

Yet the drawback to immediate submissions is the danger that one's piece will be lost in the shuffle of all the other authors who know this and are following the same strategy. Law review editors get hundreds, sometimes thousands, of submissions. These submissions tend to cluster around the opening of the submission season, meaning that an early submission may get buried in editors' Scholastica inboxes. Because of this, there may be an edge to submitting a week, or even two weeks, after the season opens to get to the top of the inbox.

I don't think there's a correct answer here. Some journals may divvy up all submissions as they come in and hold off on new submissions until older ones have been reviewed--removing the advantage of getting to the top of the inbox with a later submission. Other journals might not even bother to look at a piece until it's been accepted elsewhere. All of this complicates the picture. For what it's worth, if I have a piece that's ready to go on day one of the submission season, I'll usually send it out that day.

Still, it may be best to submit earlier in the summer cycle (August 1 through September) than the spring cycle (February 1 through March/early April). In the spring, most journals are opening new volumes and have more space to play with, and will therefore likely give more offers than they are filling the spots that remain in the summer. Because those submitting in the summer are competing for fewer spots in fewer volumes, getting in early may be better, as journals will likely close after a shorter period than they do in the spring.

What to Submit?

I attended a webinar hosted by the Yale Law Journal yesterday evening. Much of the advice they gave was in tension with other pointers: Submit early!--Or not! Avoid too much literature review!--But put in a good deal of effort situating your contribution in the existing literature! The mixture of platitudes and contradictions motivated me to write this post, if only to demonstrate that it's possible to say something concrete and helpful about the submission process.

I mention this because one of the big inconsistencies had to do with article polish. The editors repeatedly suggested that a piece being polished or publication-ready was less of a priority than explaining a piece's novelty or importance. And yet, the editors also advised that it would probably be worth submitting a piece a few days later in order to get the piece polished and finalized.

When submitting to journals, most authors (at least those who aren't Fancy) should treat the editorial process as a search for excuses to reject the piece. Journals have a limited number of spaces to fill (particularly in the summer), and they receive thousands of submissions. This means that an editor might seize on any number of reasons to reject a piece and call it a day. A section or two is underdeveloped? Footnotes missing or incomplete? Typos all over the place? All of this might be enough for an editor to choose any number of alternative articles instead.

An article will never be perfect. It's best to get it to the journals sooner, rather than later. Still, authors would do well to give the piece the appearance of polish before submitting. Do a few readthroughs to get rid of the obvious typos. Get all the footnotes in, or, at the very least, avoid [cite needed] or blank footnotes at all costs. The former approach is preferable to the latter, as blank or incomplete footnotes are more obvious issues than absent footnotes. As for formatting and Bluebooking, make your footnotes look good--within reason. Italicize the titles, small-caps the journals, and you're pretty much all the way there. The minutiae probably won't make much of a difference, but the article needs to at least look like it's ready to publish if one is to minimize easy opportunities to reject the piece.

Article length is also a topic of discussion--sometimes heated. Editors tend to recommend that articles fall between twenty and twenty-five thousand words. Thirty thousand is likely too much. This, of course, is often inconsistent with what top journals publish--much of which is well beyond these stated limits. But, as with article polish, exceptions to the rule are often reserved for those prestigious enough to get away with it. I tend to aim for 25K as a maximum, and 20K as a minimum. I suspect that authors can get away with submitting articles as low as 15K at most journals, though landing closer to 20K is ideal. Most articles likely don't need to be this long, but this is the game we play. And things are at least better than they used to be.

How to Submit?

A few years ago, my submission strategy consisted of submitting to the top twenty-five or so journals I hoped to place with, then sending out further waves of submissions if I didn't get any hits. Inevitably, I would end up submitting to far more than my initial, conservative set of journals before I got any offers (though I could sometimes end up with an offer from one of my top picks through the expedite process).

Why this approach? At the time, I was a practicing lawyer and had to pay for all my submissions. To be sure, submissions were cheaper then (I think it was only six dollars per submission rather than the current $6.60 or whatever it is now). I hoped that a limited set of submissions could save me money and end the process quickly if I happened to catch the attention of one of my most preferred journals.

I don't do this anymore. To start, most (but not all!) of my submission fees were covered by my institution once I entered academia. Most professors (or visiting professors and fellows) at law schools have their submission fees covered, in whole or in part. This makes it easier for authors to submit more articles to more journals.

More importantly, though, I got the sense that many journals--particularly those that are more highly ranked--tend to prioritize those articles that already have an offer elsewhere. These journals get so many submissions that the expedite process becomes a virtual prerequisite for an editor to consider the piece, as this brings down the number of submissions to a manageable amount (and those submissions have deadlines by which they must be reviewed). Indeed, this is how things tended to go when I was on law review. The bulk of submissions I reviewed had pending offers, though each of us on the Articles board were required to look at several pieces each week that had not been accepted elsewhere.

If journals (particularly top journals) won't bother to give a piece a read until it's got an offer somewhere else, submitting only to those top journals early in the process is a near-guarantee that the piece won't get reviewed. Maybe you'll get lucky (or maybe you'll make your own luck through institutional prestige and name recognition). But for the rest of us unlucky folks, I think the best strategy is to at least submit to a range of journals right off the bat--preferably a fairly large number of journals if doing so is financially feasible. Doing so increases the chance of a relatively early initial offer and generates the urgency of a deadline for other journals that might not even otherwise look at the piece.

Dealing with Silence

Every submission cycle, I see at least one law professor post about how editors are far more silent than they've been in years past. I'm convinced that this isn't actually the case. Folks tend to recall prior submission seasons through a post-offer and publication lens. From this perspective, the endless days of unresponsiveness fade away and are overshadowed by the triumph of the offer and the stressful chaos of the expedite process. 

I've submitted a lot of pieces in the last few years. I also submitted a flurry of articles over a decade ago when I was just out of law school and before legal practice attempted to stifle my scholarly inclinations. From this admittedly anecdotal perspective: it's always been this bad! Silence is consistently the most common response to my scholarship, and I haven't noticed any increased lack of responsiveness as the years go by.

Even so, law journals' failure to respond in any way to submissions tends to hit me as more demoralizing than rejections. A rejection at least means that someone's looked at the piece and taken the time to consider it at some level. Silence is mysterious, agonizing, and infuriating. The silver lining? Rejections are preferable to nothing--so cherish each one!

Here's a trick that I recommend to folks whose pieces have been met with silence--particularly a prolonged silence after a few initial rejections. After about three weeks, use the "start a conversation" option in Scholastica to send a mass message to all journals where your piece is still pending. Notify them that the piece is still available, give a BRIEF summary of the contribution, and invite any questions the editors have. I've done this several times, and it always prompts a few initial rejections (indicating that it at least got in front of some editors' eyes), and often leads some editors to give me an update on the review status. Remember--editors are getting a lot of submissions, and pieces tend to get buried in editors' inboxes. A gentle reminder reminds editors of your submission, and might be the prompt needed to get that review (and, perhaps, the offer!)

The Expedite Game

Once an article gets a publication offer from a journal, the next step is to notify other, higher ranked journals of the pending offer and deadline. This "expedite" request tells these other journals that the piece is serious enough to have gotten an offer elsewhere, and that there's now a time limit on when it needs to be reviewed. Expedites can be powerful--a piece that's been met with crickets for weeks might suddenly get a flurry of offers once the other journals are notified. And, as I've mentioned already, some journals likely won't even look at the piece until they get an expedite request.

Once you have an offer, to whom should you send expedite requests? I've always sent the request to every journal with which I'd rather publish--though I move at least a few (or a few dozen) steps up the rankings list when doing so. Rejecting an initial offer for another journal ranked just a spot or two above is rude--though this may not hold as true at the top of the rankings list. With that wrinkle aside, though, my expedite range is expansive, as I include the top-ranked journals in each expedite request.

Other folks I've worked with limit their expedites to journals a certain range of rankings above the accepting journal. As the thinking goes, if they get a further offer, they can then bounce it up to a higher set of journals, and keep doing so until they've got Harvard, Yale, and Stanford in a bidding war. There's some sense to this--after all, will an alert that an article has an offer from a journal ranked in the 200s mean all that much to a top-ten publication? 

Still, I think my more liberal approach to expedites has enough advantages. To start, the expedite performs a function of cutting through the noise of submissions--it's an alert that reminds editors that a piece is in their inbox. Additionally, I suspect that multiple expedite notifications on a piece signal a higher degree of interest by other editors. In choosing to review an expedited article, and editor might prioritize the article that's gotten three offers rather than one. Without those expedite notifications, however, this information goes uncommunicated. Finally, it's my understanding that many journals tend to give shorter deadlines to respond when making offers on pieces that have been expedited. Authors who expedite to everyone, and then get a short deadline on a resulting acceptance, won't be notifying editors at the higher-ranked publications of a pending offer for the first time when this happens.

As a brief note on those offer timeframes, the standard deadline to accept an offer in the past few years seems to be one week. This is a shift from when I was submitting pieces about a decade ago, when two-week deadlines were far more prevalent. Still, I find that diplomatic requests for extensions are often met with approval. And if an editor tries to make an initial offer with a less-than-one-week deadline (and they aren't at a highfalutin journal) a slightly firmer request for more time is more than justified.

Some authors submit to journals in which they don't intend to publish, hoping to secure an offer that they can use to expedite review in other, more desirable journals. I understand why some might take this approach--some journals won't even look at a piece unless it's been accepted elsewhere, and a prominent placement may be crucial for one who's going on the job market or pre-tenure. In my view, though, these reasons are insufficient justifications for the time and effort that editors put in to reading a piece and deciding to extend an offer. Those who put editors through all this work without ever intending to publish with the journal are using these law students as means to a selfish end. I never submit to a journal unless I intend to publish with it. I urge other authors to do the same.

Choosing a Journal

A publication offer feels great for a few minutes. Multiple offers feel even better. But authors refuse joy, and the thrill of acceptance soon gives way to the stress over which journal to choose. Should one go with Washington & Lee Law Review Rankings? Is US News the better metric? What about specialty journals versus flagship journals?

These questions are complicated. I've met colleagues who've developed complex spreadsheets purporting to account for these varying rankings system--spreadsheets that, if viewed for too long, melt the flesh of the skull of the reader.

Choosing a journal is often an article- and author-specific question. While flagship journals are generally preferable to specialty journals, this isn't the case for certain fields--where certain specialty journals are indicators of prestige. Washington & Lee has its uses, but tends to under-rank certain journals--particularly those that haven't been around as long.

As much as I'd like to say I'm unconcerned with the prestige of my placements, I'm junior, pre-tenure, and I want it to be tough for my scholarly interlocutors to ignore me. As a result, I find myself playing the rankings game. My approach is to consider both Washington & Lee and US News. If I'm choosing between offers, I'll likely prioritize one that has a significant advantage in one or both of the rankings. Gut feelings over name recognition is a tie-breaker, and it always helps to speak with colleagues or friends about what they think is preferable. In the end, just know that the problem of choosing a journal is a good problem to have.

For those with tenure and who don't hope to make any career moves, perhaps prestige should take a backseat to other considerations. Those valuing the time and efforts of law review editors may eschew the expedite game altogether. I've known of at least one colleague who indicated in his cover letter that he'd accept the first offer--which he eventually did. Since I write so much, I've done a few exclusive submissions myself--including promising to accept the first offer, or submitting during an off-cycle, exclusive window (which more journals should consider offering). Getting pieces placed this way takes some of the pressure (psychological and financial) off of the regular submission season. If this is a luxury you can afford, give it some thought!

Should I Use Artificial Intelligence to Write the Article I Hope to Submit?

No!

Good luck!