OUR SUBMISSIONS REVIEW PROCESS

The Stanford Law Review takes pride in carefully and fairly reviewing every submission that we receive. Our Articles Committee is responsible for selecting every Article that we publish. We have multiple stages of review, but every piece that we accept is reviewed by the entire committee.

Submissions Management

Beginning with Volume 71, we now accept Articles and Essay submissions for our Print Edition exclusively through Scholastica. Pieces cannot be submitted through ExpressO or email, except as indicated below. Paper submissions will not be reviewed.

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

Blind Review

It is our policy to apply the same standards of review to all submissions, and to judge pieces based solely on their content. To that end, our review process is fully blind until the Committee’s final vote. All voting Articles Editors complete their reads without knowledge of the author’s identity, institutional affiliation, or any other biographical information. Only the Senior Articles Editor knows the identity of the author; they handle all communication with the author.

Exploding Offers

On April 19, 2011, the Stanford Law Review and several peer journals released a joint letter committing to give every author at least seven days to decide whether to accept any offer of publication. Eliminating “exploding offers” will improve the quality of our deliberations and the scholarship that we publish, and we invite all other student-edited law journals to adopt this policy.

Exclusive Submissions

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 (but after the submission portal opens). Because we undertake a very thorough review of all submissions, we are typically unable to make quick acceptances when faced with exploding offers from other journals.

Demographic Information

As part of the Stanford Law Review‘s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, we are requesting that authors voluntarily provide demographic information.

Providing this information is optional. The information will not be available to any reviewers during our review process and is being collected for aggregating statistics at the end of the year. Your decision to abstain from providing this information will not adversely affect your submission during our review process.

The Stanford Law Review will not disclose personally identifiable information outside of the Law Review. The Stanford Law Review may use your information, aggregated together with information from others, both within and outside of Stanford in order to better design and execute on recruitment of diverse authors and track diversity goals. We also may disclose that aggregated data, for example, to share that a specific percentage of the journal’s authors identify as women or a particular race or ethnicity, and related trends of such data over time.

For more information on Scholastica’s data access and usage, please visit their Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, and Data Processing Addendum.

MANUSCRIPT SPECIFICATIONS

Anonymization

In order to preserve Stanford Law Review‘s blind review process, manuscript files must be anonymized, that is, stripped of names and identifying information. Please note that if your piece includes citations referring to your other works but which do not identify that they are citations to your own work (i.e., these citations do not use phrases like “my article” or “the author”), you do not need to redact your name from them. If your citations do include phrases that indicate the citations or notes reference your own work, please remove the identifying phrases throughout the document before submission, and email articles [at] stanfordlawreview [dot] org with any questions. We will not accept manuscripts that do not comport with this requirement.

Authors should enter their name and identifying information only in the designated form fields when they submit their article via Scholastica. Only the Senior Articles Editor will see this identifying information.

Résumés and biographical information are not required.

Style

The text and citations of the submission should conform to The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (21st ed. 2020), copyright by the Columbia Law Review Association, the Harvard Law Review Association, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal.

Article Length

The Stanford Law Review has a word limit of 30,000 words (including footnotes), and a preference for 20,000 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.

Please include a brief abstract of your submission with the text. The abstract will not be counted toward the word limit.

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 author conduct. Therefore, Stanford Law Review has adopted the following conditions for accepting an Article or Essay:

• (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 Stanford 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. It is our practice to subject submissions 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. 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 merely benefited the author, rather than funded the expenses of a project.

FINANCIAL HARDSHIP

We recognize that the fee associated with submitting manuscripts through Scholastica may cause financial hardship for some authors. As part of their commitment to ensuring broad access to legal publishing, Scholastica is willing to consider requests for fee waivers and other accommodations. Please direct fee waiver requests to support@scholasticahq.com.

If Scholastica is unable to accommodate your circumstances, please email your submission to William Weightman, Senior Articles Editor for Volume 77, at articles@stanfordlawreview.org. Please ensure that you attach an anonymized version of your article in your email in accordance with the instructions above under “Anonymization,” and that you include your name and institutional affiliation in the body of your email.

OTHER ISSUES

Please address any additional questions about the submissions process to William Weightman, Senior Articles Editor for Volume 77, at articles@stanfordlawreview.org.