Rostron & Levit's guide to submitting to law reviews: a new edition

Professors Rostron and Levit write:

 

Dear Colleagues,

We  just updated our charts about law journal submissions, expedites, and rankings from different sources for the Spring 2022 submission season covering the 196 main journals of each law school.   

We have created hyperlinks for each law review to take you directly to the law review’s submissions page. Again the chart includes as much information as possible about what law reviews are not accepting submissions right now and what months they say they’ll resume accepting submissions.  Interestingly, 94 websites now say something about whether they are accepting submissions and when they will.  While many of these notes are simply that the law review is not currently accepting submissions, some give specific dates or ballpark time frames for the opening of their submissions season.  The most common designations of “opening dates” were either February or Spring 2022. (Just FYI, in the Northern Hemisphere, Spring begins on March 20, 2022; but we suspect the law reviews are referring to some unspecified date within the season of Spring.)

ExpressO has shut down its submission service for law reviews.

As for submission methods:

Submission portal                                2

Scholastica or submission portal          2 

All-symposia format                            4

Email only                                           41

Scholastica or email                             50  

Scholastica only                                   97

Also, there are a substantial number of law reviews that are listed on Scholastica but do not mention Scholastica in their submission information on their websites, so it is not clear whether the law review encourages or prefers use of Scholastica.  For these law reviews, we have simply noted that it is possible to submit through Scholastica. Authors may essentially be paying $6.50 just to have Scholastica send an e-mail for them; we just don’t know.

The first chart contains information about each journal’s preferences about methods for submitting articles (e.g., e-mail, ExpressO, Scholastica, or regular mail), as well as special formatting requirements and how to request an expedited review.  The second chart contains rankings information from U.S. News and World Report  (overall, peer, lawyers and judges), as well as data from Washington & Lee’s law review website (citation count, impact factor, and combined ratings).

Information for Submitting Articles to Law Reviews and Journals:  http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1019029 

We would welcome your forwarding of this link to your faculty.   We appreciate any feedback you might have.

Happy writing!

All the best,

Allen and Nancy