Article Submissions (Closed)

Our Submissions Review Process

Stanford Law Review takes pride in carefully and fairly reviewing every submission that we receive.

Our review process is fully blind up until the committee’s final vote. All voting Articles Editors complete their reads without knowledge of the author’s identity. Only the Senior Articles Editor can view authors’ identifying information; he or she handles all communication with the author.

It is our practice to seek informal peer reviews for pieces that reach our final stage of review.  The Articles Committee values the feedback of peer reviewers, but ultimately makes an independent decision on whether to extend an offer.

Manuscript Specifications

In order to preserve Stanford Law Review’s blind review process, article files must be stripped of all names and identifying information. Authors should enter their name and identifying information only in the designated form fields when they upload their article to the Stanford Law Review website. Only the Senior Articles Editor will see this identifying information. Any special requests or instructions (but no names) should be entered in the “Notes” field.

Please include a brief abstract of your submission with the text. Résumés and biographical information are not required.

The text and citations of the Law Review generally conform to The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (20th ed. 2015), copyright by the Columbia Law Review Association, Inc., the Harvard Law Review Association, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal Company, Inc.

Electronic Submissions

The Stanford Law Review evaluates only article manuscripts submitted using the form below. Articles cannot be submitted to the Stanford Law Review through ExpressO or any other electronic service. Paper submissions will not be reviewed. Please use the form below to submit a manuscript for consideration.

To instead submit an Essay for potential publication in the Stanford Law Review Online, visit the online essays submissions page.

Article Length

The Stanford Law Review has a word limit of 30,000 words (including footnotes), and a preference for 25,000 words or fewer. We value brevity and look favorably on pieces below the 30,000-word ceiling. The Stanford Law Review is among the fifteen leading law reviews that have signed this joint statement.

Expedite/Withdraw Requests

In the event that you receive an alternative publication offer or otherwise wish to request that the Law Review either expedite consideration of your article or that your article be withdrawn from consideration, please use the “Edit My Submission” link you received in the email confirming your submission.

Exclusive Submission

If your preference is to publish in the Stanford Law Review, we strongly recommend that you submit your manuscript to us exclusively, at least ten days before submitting it to other journals. We conduct peer reviews for all pieces that we accept, and each piece will be reviewed by every member of the Articles Committee. We are therefore often unable to make quick decisions when faced with exploding offers from other journals. We apply the same standards of review to all submissions, but submitting exclusively makes it more likely that we will have time to put the manuscript through all of our stages. If you decide to submit with us exclusively, please check the “Exclusive” box below and indicate the date you will submit to other journals in the accompanying “Exclusive Until” field.

Ethics Policy

In the past few decades, legal scholarship has increased in sophistication, depth, scale, and volume. While The Bluebook rigorously governs methods of citation, law reviews have generally lagged in adopting similar standards for documentation of data, the most important source in empirical works. Similarly, law reviews have been unique in failing to articulate basic ethics standards. These failures threaten the validity, credibility, prestige and potential of student-run law reviews. To address these concerns, the Stanford Law Review conditions its acceptance of articles upon satisfaction of the following requirements:

(I) Originality: Articles must be the original work of the author or authors identified on the submission, except for material in the public domain or material from other works that are properly cited or included with the permission of the rights owners. The article, in whole or in part, must not have been published before.

(II) Replicability: At a minimum, empirical works must document and archive all datasets so that third parties may replicate the published findings. These datasets will be published on our website. The Law Review will make narrow exceptions on a case-by-case basis, particularly if the datasets involve issues of confidentiality and/or privacy.

(III) Peer Review: Peer review not only enhances an article’s quality, but guarantees originality. Submissions will be subject to peer review, albeit in a form amenable to the typical law review selection timeframes.

(IV) Conflicts of Interest: Authors must disclose any conflicts of interest. This includes any financial interest that may be affected by the results or conclusions in the submission. This also includes any source of outside funding for the submission that may have affected or biased the assumptions, results,  or conclusions in the submission–for example, any payment received by an outside organization to complete the work. If the funding helped pay for the expenses associated with a project (travel, data compilation, simulations, etc.), we simply ask that the connection be noted and the organization thanked. NOTE: We do not, however, publish pieces for which the author was paid taxable income by an organization other than the relevant employer–that is, income from an outside organization or corporation that simply went to the author, rather than funding the expenses of a project.

Other Issues

Please address any additional questions about the submissions process to Karen L. Ding, Senior Articles Editor for Volume 70, at articles@stanfordlawreview.org. Please do not e-mail submissions to this address.