HOW TO SUBMIT 

The Yale Law Journal is no longer accepting submissions for Volume 134, with the exception of student submissions for Notes, Comments, and pieces for the Student Essay Competition. To submit a piece, please visit our online submission system. If this is your first time using our submission system, please make a new account by clicking “Not a member?” on the login page.

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SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

• Authors submitting Articles, Essays, and Book Reviews should refer to our General Submission Guidelines. Please note that the Journal is adopting a solicitation-only model for its Features and will no longer be accepting Features submissions.
• Yale Law School J.D. and M.S.L. students submitting Notes and Comments should refer to the Student Submission Guidelines. 
• Both professional authors and law students submitting YLJ Forum Essays or Responses should refer to the Forum Submission Guidelines.
• The Journal’s Style Guide is available here.

For the Journal’s guidelines pertaining to empirical work, please refer to the Data-Retention Policy for Authors and Dataverse Instructions.

Attribution: We endeavor to publish scholarship that properly attributes ideas and language to their original sources. For language that is taken verbatim from other sources, we require quotation marks and citations that conform to the Bluebook and the Journal’s citation requirements. For language that is paraphrased, we also require citations that conform to the Bluebook and the Journal’s requirements. These requirements apply regardless of whether the author is citing their own previously published work. 

ARTICLES AND ESSAYS

The division between these two forms of professional scholarship serves not merely to separate longer pieces from shorter ones, but also to encourage two distinct and complementary approaches to legal analysis.

• Articles devote substantial space to situating themselves within existing research, and often frame their arguments as comprehensive analyses of a given subject.
• Essays are often narrower in scope than Articles, but the subject matter is of general scholarly interest. Essays may experiment with style, tone, and voice. The ultimate goal of an Essay is to start a new and interesting scholarly conversation.

The Articles & Essays Committee reviews submissions without knowledge of the identity of the authors. We do not review Articles or Essays written by current J.D. students at Yale Law School, or by authors who were J.D. students at Yale Law School at any time during Volume 134’s submission window. We encourage Yale Law School J.D. students to submit their work as a Note, Comment, or Forum piece.

On April 19, 2011, the Yale Law Journal and several peer journals released a joint letter committing to give every author at least seven days to decide whether to accept any offer of publication.  Eliminating exploding offers will improve the quality of our deliberations and the scholarship that we publish, and we invite all other student-edited law journals to adopt this policy.

FEATURES

Features are solicited contributions that spotlight a given subject with the goal of opening or renewing a scholarly debate. Conceived as longer pieces offering comprehensive analyses, Features often suggest novel frameworks, reconceptualize existing bodies of research, or surface new lines of scholarly inquiry.

BOOK REVIEWS

Book Reviews are thoughtful commentaries authored by professors and practitioners on forthcoming or recently published books. In addition to reviewing the book, these pieces often use the book as a springboard for new lines of scholarly inquiry. We accept both Book Review proposals as well as full drafts. 

For recent examples, see Annette Gordon-Reed, Writing About the Past That Made Us: Scholars, Civic Culture, and the American Present and Future, 131 Yale L.J. 948 (2022) (reviewing Akhil Reed Amar, The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840 (2021)); Angela Onwuachi-Willig & Anthony V. Alfieri, (Re)Framing Race in Civil Rights Lawyering, 130 Yale L.J. 2052 (2021) (reviewing Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (2019)); and Amul R. Thapar & Joe Masterman, Fidelity and Construction, 129 Yale L.J. 774 (2020) (reviewing Lawrence Lessig, Fidelity & Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution (2019)).

FORUM ESSAYS, RESPONSES, AND COLLECTIONS

YLJ Forum pieces are authored by professors, practitioners, and students and are generally shorter, timelier, and more accessible to a general audience than other YLJ publications. The Forum Committee accepts submissions for Forum pieces, in addition to soliciting them.

• Forum Essays are original and timely pieces that bear directly on unfolding legal events, blending the common appeal of op-eds with the rigor of scholarship. For two recent examples, see On “Confetti Regulation”: The Wrong Way to Regulate Gamified Investing by Kyle Langvardt & James Fallows Tierney; and Ordering Conduct Yet Evading Review: A Simple Step Toward Preserving Federal Supremacy by Georgina Yeomans.
• Forum Responses are scholarly reactions to our print and online content. They allow academics, practitioners, and students to engage with and challenge one another. YLJ Forum may feature multiple Responses to a given online or print piece. A recent example is Anthony O’Rourke’s Response to Rethinking Police Expertise, by Anna Lvovsky.
• Forum Collections are explorations of a single legal subject, with authors contributing distinct perspectives and engaging in dialogue with each other. For a recent example, see The Insular Cases in Light of Aurelius, which included contributions by Justice Stephen G. Breyer, Judge José A. Cabranes, Aziz Rana, Adriel I. Cepeda Derieux & Neil C. Weare, and Christina D. Ponsa-Kraus.
• Forum Exchanges are a category of Forum content introduced in Volume 132. They feature authors writing separate pieces in direct dialogue with one another on the same timely issue. For a recent example, see Ralph Baxter, Dereliction of Duty: State-Bar Inaction in Response to America’s Access-to-Justice Crisis, 132 Yale L.J. F. 228 (2022); and Stephen P. Younger, The Pitfalls and False Promises of Nonlawyer Ownership of Law Firms, 132 Yale L.J. F. 259 (2022). YLJ Forum is accepting proposals for Exchanges through our submissions system.

NOTES

Notes are publications of substantial length authored by students at the Yale Law School, frequently with the assistance of the Journal’s Notes Development Editors. Successful Notes develop an innovative and well-supported thesis in a way that advances a particular legal field. The Notes & Comments Committee selects Notes through an anonymized review process, with Development Editors recused from voting on submissions from authors with whom they have worked.  

COMMENTS

Comments are short pieces (between 3,000 and 7,000 words) authored by students at the Yale Law School, frequently with the assistance of the Journal’s Comments Development Editors. Comments offer a novel idea about a discrete legal issue, often drawing on clinical or research experiences. While Comments are subject to the Journal’s normal standards for originality, they need not include an extensive literature review. The Notes & Comments Committee also chooses Comments through an anonymized review process, with appropriate recusals during voting.