HOW TO SUBMIT 

Volume 129 is no longer accepting submissions of Articles, Essays, Features, or Book Reviews. We continue to accept submissions for Forum Essays and Responses. Notes and Comments are solicited at regular drop dates throughout the year; the next and final drop date for Volume 129 will be on October 2, 2019.

To submit, please use our online submissions system. 

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SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

• Authors submitting Articles, Essays, and Book Reviews should refer to our General Submission Guidelines.
• Yale Law School students submitting Notes and Comments should refer to the Drop Dates and Student Submission Guidelines.
• Both Professional authors and Yale Law School students submitting YLJ Forum Essays or Responses should refer to the Forum Submission Guidelines. Yale Law School students must additionally submit a Forum Submission Form.

The Journal’s Style Sheet is available here.

The Journal’s Empirical Work Policy is available here.

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 they 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 129’s submissions window. We encourage Yale Law School J.D. students to submit their work as a Note, Comment, or Forum Essay.

For data regarding when to submit Articles and Essays to YLJ, please click here.

For our policy on exploding offers, please click here.

FORUM ESSAYS, RESPONSES, AND COLLECTIONS

YLJ Forum pieces are authored by professors, practitioners, and students, and they are generally shorter, timelier, and accessible to a general audience. Submissions are reviewed by the Forum & Features Committee without knowledge of the authors’ identities.

• YLJ 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, please see Triptych’s End: A Better Framework To Evaluate 21st Century International Lawmaking by Professor Harold Hongju Koh and Predicting Utah v. Strieff’s Civil Rights Impact  by Professor Katherine A. Macfarlane.

• YLJ Forum Responses are scholarly reactions to our print and online content. The goal is for academics, practitioners, and students to use the YLJ Forum to engage with and challenge one another. YLJ Forum may feature multiple Responses to a given online or print piece. The Forum Committee additionally may solicit responses to print pieces and symposia commentaries. For a recent example, please see Cindy Cohn’s Response to The Fourth Amendment in the Information Age by Robert S. Litt.

• YLJ 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, please see the Collection on the Freedom of Information Act, which included contributions from David E. McCraw, Jameel Jaffer & Brett M. Kaufman, Melanie A. Pustay, Margaret B. Kwoka, and Beth Simone Noveck. The Forum Committee accepts submissions for Collection topics and pieces in addition to soliciting them.

BOOK REVIEWS

Book Reviews are thoughtful commentaries by professors and practitioners on forthcoming or recently published books. They often use the book as a springboard for new lines of scholarly inquiry.

Volume 129 of the Yale Law Journal is now accepting propsals for Book Reviews and will begin our review of those proposals in February 2019.

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 a blind 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 a blind review process, with appropriate recusals during voting.