Underneath the Law Review Submission Process

This month, I plan on doing a series of posts to try to uncover some of the mysteries of the law review submission process. Many people who submitted articles this winter are probably finished and have selected a journal, with or without regrets as to their final choice (hopefully mostly with relief and excitement to have a home for the article).

I don’t know about any of you, but every time I submit an article I go through some serious questioning and doubt not only about the article I have written but about how to conduct myself during the process. When should I submit my article? How many journals should I submit to? When do I expedite review to other journals? Do I expedite from the bottom to the top every time? The doubt and insecurity that comes after submission of an article may not be able to be resolved once and for all. And article submission may always be an anxiety-ridden process, but I feel that the more I know about the process and the more up to date I am about it, the better.

So, I will blog in the next few weeks about a series of interviews I’ve conducted with some articles editors at various law reviews about the factors that are important to them in their selections and some of the nitty-gritty on Law Reviews. I will also blog about some tips from professors from non-top-tier schools about the placement process. I found the series of posts last year on Prawfs by Dave Fagundes, and Matt Bodie, and on Opinio Juris by James Tierney extremely helpful, so I plan not to replicate those posts too much. I hope instead to add some further insight on the unanswered questions and some additional perspectives to the recurring questions that we may face.

If you have any questions you would like to know the answers to, feel free to comment or email me off-line and I can try to get the answers in my remaining interviews.