The Yale Law Journal

Announcing the Ninth Annual Student Essay Competition

Matt Beattie-Callahan
30 Mar 2025

The Yale Law Journal is excited to announce its ninth annual Student Essay Competition. The Journal’s Student Essay Competition challenges the next generation of legal scholars and practitioners to reflect on emerging legal problems. The Competition is open to current law students and recent law-school graduates nationwide. Up to three winners will be awarded a $300 cash prize. Winning submissions will be published in the Yale Law Journal Forum, the Journal’s online component. All Forum Essays are fully searchable and available on LexisNexis, Westlaw, and our website. Last year’s winning Essays can be viewed on our website here.

Competition Topic: Emerging Issues in the Executive Power

This year, we invite submissions focusing on novel developments in the executive power, broadly understood. Essays should grapple with how the executive branch shapes and is shaped by the coordinate branches, new political and social realities, changing technologies, and/or other recent developments at home or abroad. We encourage submissions on a range of topics, including structural constitutional law and the separation of powers; collaboration and struggle between the federal executive and the states; administrative law and the evolving role of federal agencies; foreign policy, international law, and the U.S. relationship to our global allies and adversaries; executive control and discretion in the fields of immigration, prosecution, and incarceration; access to benefits and the welfare state; and any related areas that engage with the contemporary role of the executive branch. We hope to receive both clinical and academic submissions.

Eligibility and Submission Details

The competition is open to all current law students and recent law-school graduates (JDs and LLMs from the Classes of 2023-2028) from any ABA-accredited law school. Each individual may submit only one piece. Submissions must be previously unpublished Essays and may not be submitted to other publications during the competition period.

The submission deadline is September 5, 2025, at 5 p.m. ET. Submissions must be no shorter than 4,000 words and no longer than 8,000 words, including footnotes.

Essays must be submitted via the Journal’s online submissions portal. When asked to select “Submission Type,” please select “Student Essay Competition” (do not select “Forum Essay (Students)”).

Please submit your Essay as a Word document. Your submission file should be titled “YLJ Essay Competition - [ESSAY TITLE]” and include a header with “YLJ Essay Competition” in the main text of your document. To ensure anonymized review, please do not include any identifying information, including name, class year, or institution, in your Essay’s body or metadata. Failure to anonymize your Essay may disqualify it from consideration by the Selection Committee.

The Selection Committee will consider all submissions anonymously. Winners will be announced in October 2025. Authors who submit winning Essays commit to publication in the Yale Law Journal Forum and agree to participate in our full editing process. This process involves structural and substantive suggestions, sourceciting for content, and adherence to Bluebook style.

Disbursement of the cash prize to each winner is subject to any applicable tax reporting and withholding requirements.

Please direct questions about the Student Essay Competition to the Managing Editors, Matthew Beattie-Callahan (matthew.beattie-callahan@yale.edu) and Ako Ndefo-Haven (ako.ndefo-haven@yale.edu). We look forward to reading your submissions!