HOW TO SUBMIT 

Volume 131 is now accepting submissions. We will begin reviewing submissions on February 8, 2021. 

To submit, please use our online submission system. If this is your first time using our new submission system (launched in February 2021), 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 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.

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

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 131’s submission window. We encourage Yale Law School J.D. students to submit their work as a Note, Comment, or Forum piece.

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 are generally shorter, timelier, and more accessible to a general audience than other YLJ publications. 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, see Reading the ACA’s Findings: Textualism, Severability and the ACA’s Return to the Court by Abbe Gluck and Deadly Delay: The FDA’s Role in America’s COVID-Testing Debacle by Barbara J. Evans and Ellen Wright Clayton.
• YLJ 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. Recent examples include Edward J. Janger and Adam J. Levitin’s Response to Distorted Choice in Corporate Bankruptcy by David A. Skeel, Jr. and Catherine L. Fisk’s Response to Constructing Countervailing Power: Law and Organizing in an Era of Political Inequality by Kate Andrias and Benjamin I. Sachs.
• 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, 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 and Neil C. Weare, and Christina D. Ponsa-Kraus. The Committee accepts submissions for Collection topics and pieces, in addition to soliciting them.

BOOK REVIEWS

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

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.