Clean-up Post on On-line Journals and Amicus Briefs

I received a few e-mails and saw some questions and requests posted in the comments I wanted to be sure to address. 

 

On-Line Journals

First, I do not think there is any best time to submit except perhaps that I would avoid final exam period.  Second, I believe most are now available on Westlaw or Lexis, but I'm not sure.  Third, whereas it is theoretically possible the on-line journals are reaching a wider audience, I do not know whether that is true.  In any event, I would recommend posting all of one's publications on SSRN. 

 

Amicus Briefs

First, when a brief gets bounced because of an ECF problem, one typically has seven days to correct the problem.  Second, my understanding is that courts typically are strict about deadlines.  On the other hand, there are no amicus brief rules in district court, so judicial discretion will control.  Third, below is reprinting of a student's cheat sheet (without any editing from me) on finalizing a document for Electronic Court Filing (ECF).  For the most part, the courts' on-line instructions are good, but for someone like me who has not formatted a brief myself since law school, these things are things I always need help with.  He addresses three things not addressed on the courts' web pages:  (1) Creating a Table of Contents [applicable to ECF or non-ECF documents]; (2) Combining sections in Word to preserve pagination format changes to prep for PDF conversion; and (3) maintaining pagination in PDF to exactly correlate to the Word document, which is required for ECF.   

 

Conclusion

I hope these posts were helpful to some of you.  Feel free to e-mail me at [email protected] if I can help you with anything related to these posts.