HOW TO SUBMIT 

Volume 130 is no longer accepting submissions. Volume 131 will begin reviewing submissions on February 8, 2021. Please do not submit your work prior to February 8, as we plan to transition to a new submissions portal.

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SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

• Authors submitting Articles, Essays, Features, 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.

The Journal’s Style Guide 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 130’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 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, Did Bristol-Myers Squibb Kill the Nationwide Class Action? by Daniel Wilf-Townsend and An Intersectional Critique of Tiers of Scrutiny: Beyond “Either/Or” Approaches to Equal Protection by Devon W. Carbado & Kimberlé W. Crenshaw.

• 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 Elizabeth Chamblee Burch’s Response to The Lessons of Lone Pine by Nora Freeman Engstrom.

• 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, The Nineteenth Amendment at 100, which included contributions from Reva B. Siegel, Arzoo Osanloo, and Serena Mayeri. The 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 130 of the Yale Law Journal is now accepting proposals for Book Reviews and will begin our review of those proposals in February 2020.

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.