Since 2005, when we launched an online companion called The Pocket Part, YLJ has been leading the transition among law reviews from traditional media to the web. This has been a decade of experimentation for us—with a wide range of formats, contributors, and themes. We are now taking two major steps forward in our ongoing effort to capitalize on the opportunities presented by online media.

I. The Website

Our new website makes traditional Journal content, including both new issues and our archives, immediately available in a highly readable and usable format. There are many ways to read YLJ, but we think this website—with its clean design, out-of-the-way footnotes, integration with social media, and connections to related audio and video—may be the best. And, in becoming the first law review to offer our traditional content in a web-native format, we hope to lay a foundation for further exploration and innovation in the years to come.

II. The YLJ Forum

In 2005, YLJ was the first law review to launch an online companion.  In 2009, we integrated The Pocket Part more fully with the Journal’s core content and rebranded it as YLJ Online. We are now re-launching it with a new name—recognizing that YLJ itself is now mainly read “online”—and a refined mission.

Like YLJ Online, the YLJ Forum will be a hub for short-form, timely discussion of ideas about the law. But the Forum will sharpen our focus on brevity, speed, and relevance to current developments in the law and legal scholarship. As a general-interest law review, we hope to offer a platform for online dialogue that features a wider array of contributors and subject matter than many legal blogs have attempted thus far. We hope that the Forum will also offer new opportunities forYLJ’s student editors to participate in that dialogue—through both short comments on recent developments and aggregation posts that highlight interesting work in other law reviews and media. 

The Forum launches with an online symposium considering Justice Sotomayor’s emerging jurisprudence in her first five years on the Court, including an edited transcript of a conversation between Justice Sotomayor and Linda Greenhouse at Yale Law School.

III. Submitting to the Forum

Beginning today, the Forum will accept submissions from scholars, practitioners, and students in two categories: 1) essays of no more than 2,000 words (including footnotes) that grapple with relevant issues as they unfold, and therefore merit swifter publication than the print medium might allow; and 2) responses of no more than 6,000 words (including footnotes) to recent pieces published in the print Journal. 

Full submission guidelines are available here.