Posted by Orin Kerr:
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 come up a lot
but no one has written about yet, and 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 [1]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, and both Stanford and Penn required you to write down your
tracking 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 [2]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 [3]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 [4]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.
References
1. http://volokh.com/posts/1108424867.shtml
2. http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_02_06-2005_02_12.shtml#1108060955
3. http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_02_06-2005_02_12.shtml#1108060955
4. http://www.theconglomerate.org/2005/02/the_bias_of_law_1.html
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