The Faculty Lounge

CFP: Seventh Annual Equality Law Scholars’ Forum

Call for Proposals for the Seventh Annual Equality Law Scholars’ Forum

November 7-8, 2025

LMU Loyola Law School, Los Angeles

Building on the success of the Equality Law Scholars’ Forum held over the past seven years, and in the spirit of academic engagement and mentoring in the area of Equality Law, we (Tristin Green, Loyola Law Los Angeles; Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Boston University Law; and Leticia Saucedo, UC Davis Law) are thrilled to announce the Seventh Annual Equality Law Scholars’ Forum to be held in Fall 2025. 

This Scholars’ Forum seeks to provide junior scholars with commentary and critique and to provide scholars at all career stages the opportunity to engage with new scholarly currents and ideas.  We hope to bring together scholars with varied perspectives (e.g., critical race theory, class critical theory, queer theory, feminist legal theory, law and economics, law and society) across fields (e.g., criminal system, education, employment, family, health, immigration, property, tax) and with work relevant to many diverse identities (e.g., age, class, disability, national origin, race, sex, sexuality) to build bridges and to generate new ideas in the area of Equality Law.  

We will select five or six relatively junior scholars (untenured, newly tenured, or prospective professors) in the U.S. to present papers from proposals submitted in response to this Call for Proposals. In so doing, we will select papers that cover a broad range of topics within the area of Equality Law.  Leading senior scholars will provide commentary on each of the featured papers in an intimate and collegial setting.  The Forum will take place all day Friday through lunch on Saturday.  Participants are expected to attend the full Forum.  The Equality Law Scholars’ Forum will pay transportation and accommodation expenses for participants and will host a dinner on Friday evening.  

This year’s Forum will be held on November 7-8, 2025, at LMU Loyola Law School, Los Angeles.

Junior scholars are invited to submit abstracts of proposed papers, 3-5 pages in length, by May 15, 2025.   

Full drafts of papers must be available for circulation to participants by October 21, 2025. 

Note: We urge submission of proposals for drafts that will still be substantially in progress in November 2025 over drafts that will be in late-stage law review edits at that time.

Proposals should be submitted to:

Leticia Saucedo, UC Davis Law, [email protected]. Electronic submissions via email are preferred.

Call for Papers: Harvard/Yale/Stanford Junior Faculty Forum, June 2-3, 2025

Request for Submissions

Harvard/Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum

June 2-3, 2025, Harvard Law School

Harvard, Stanford, and Yale Law Schools are soliciting submissions for the 2025 Harvard/Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum, to be held at Harvard Law School on June 2-3, 2025. Twelve to twenty junior scholars (with one to seven years in teaching) will be chosen, through a double-blind selection process, to present their work at the Forum. A senior scholar will comment on each paper. The audience will include the participating junior faculty, senior faculty from the host institutions, and invited guests. The goal of the Forum is to promote in-depth discussion about particular papers and more general reflections on broader methodological issues, as well as to foster a stronger sense of community among American legal scholars, particularly by strengthening ties between new and veteran professors.

TOPICS: Each year the Forum invites submissions on selected topics in public and private law, legal theory, and law and humanities topics, alternating loosely between public law and humanities subjects in one year, and private law and dispute resolution in the next. For the upcoming 2025 meeting, the topics will cover these areas of the law:

Administrative Law

Antidiscrimination Law and Theory

Constitutional Law—theoretical foundations

Constitutional Law—historical foundations

Criminal Law

Critical Legal Studies

Environmental Law

Family Law

Jurisprudence and Philosophy

Law and Humanities

Legislation and Statutory Interpretation

Public International Law

Workplace Law and Social Welfare Policy

A jury of accomplished scholars will choose the papers to be presented. There is no publication commitment. Harvard Law School will pay presenters’ travel expenses, though international flights may be only partially reimbursed.

QUALIFICATIONS: Authors who teach law in the U.S. in a tenured or tenure-track position as of the submission deadline (February 28, 2025) and have not been teaching at either of those ranks for a total of more than seven years are eligible to submit their work. American citizens or permanent residents teaching abroad are also eligible provided that they have held a faculty position or the equivalent, including positions comparable to junior faculty positions in research institutions, for less than seven years and that they earned their last degree after 2015. We accept jointly authored submissions, but each of the coauthors must be individually eligible to participate in the Forum. Papers that will be published prior to the Forum are not eligible. There is no limit on the number of submissions by any individual author. Faculty from Harvard, Stanford, and Yale Law Schools are not eligible.

PAPER SUBMISSION PROCEDURE: Electronic submissions should be sent to Rebecca Tushnet at [email protected] with the subject line “Junior Faculty Forum.” The deadline for submissions is February 28, 2025. Remove all references to the author(s) in the paper. Please include in the text of the email your name, the title of your paper, your contact email and address through June 2025, and under which topic your paper falls. Each paper may only be considered under one topic. Any questions about the submission procedure should be directed to Rebecca Tushnet.

FURTHER INFORMATION: Inquiries concerning the Forum should be sent to Christine Jolls ([email protected]) or Yair Listokin ([email protected]) at Yale Law School, Rebecca Tushnet ([email protected]) at Harvard Law School, or Norman Spaulding ([email protected]) at Stanford Law School.

Christine Jolls

Yair Listokin

Rebecca Tushnet

Norman Spaulding

AI and the Future of Research Surveys

As law professors, most of us don't have much (if any) training in traditional social science research methodology like surveys. On the few occasions that I've dipped a toe into those waters (e.g., here), I've teamed with other researchers who have experience with those methods. Apart from lack of familiarity and training, another wrinkle for many law profs is that survey work typically requires approval of the applicable institutional review board. Law faculties are far less accustomed to dealing with IRB approval than, say, medical school faculties.

I was interested to read (here) in today's Inside Higher Education about two researchers at the London School of Economics, Friedrich Geiecke (Computational Social Science) and Xavier Jaravel (Economics), who have created an open access tool with promising survey capabilities: Conversations at Scale: Robust AI-led Interviews with a Simple Open-Source Platform.

Here's a descriptive excerpt from the IHE article by Juliette Rowsell:

Rather than having a standard set of multiple-choice and open text questions, as has typically been the case with online surveys, the chat bot takes a conversational approach, collecting interviewees’ responses and using them to generate new questions within a broad set of parameters. ***

In trials, it demonstrated some impressive results. A team of sociology Ph.D. students from Harvard University and the London School of Economics that was asked to assess the quality of the interviews based on transcripts rated them as being broadly comparable to interviews conducted by human experts.

And when the almost 1,000 study participants were asked to evaluate their interaction with the chat bot, the majority said they had enjoyed it and preferred this mode of interview over open text fields. Only 15 percent of respondents said they would have preferred the interview to have been conducted by a person.

I will be following this technology with interest.

Final Call for Applications: Participatory Law Fund Awards

This just in from my Drexel University Kline Law colleague, Professor Rachel Lopez.  Rachel is doing amazing work using tools of participatory law scholarship.

This is a gentle reminder that applications to the Participatory Law Fund are due on Dec. 15, 2023. The fund is devoted to supporting the production of an emerging genre of legal scholarship called "participatory law scholarship" or PLS. As defined in Participatory Law Scholarship, recently published in the Columbia Law Review, PLS is legal scholarship written in collaboration with authors who have no formal training in the law, but rather expertise in law's injustice through lived experience. The PLF provides awards to the co-authors of PLS who are not lawyers or academics.

Applications can be submitted here. Awards will be made in the amounts of $4,000 for full length articles (over 20,000 words) and $2,000 for essays (between 10,000 words and 20,000 words). The Selection Committee will announce the recipients of the awards in February 2024 and the funds will be awarded upon completion of the piece.

Donations to the fund can also be made here. Your donation will allow us to make more awards available going forward. The hope is to be able to continue to fund this work for years to come.

Law Professor Twitter Social Media Census: Call for Updates and New Entries

Bumping to the front 10/2

Since 2012, I've been compiling a user-populated census of law professors on Twitter, now known as X. Given the recent changes to that social media platform, my anecdotal sense is that the overall volume of law professor dialogue there has declined and that some (many?) colleagues have migrated to other platforms.

In an effort to capture the X diaspora, this year's census asks users to list their names, school affiliation, and areas of interest (as before).  New this year is the option to list handles on X (formerly Twitter), Meta, Blue Sky, Mastodon, and any other network.

If you're already in the census, please confirm your details and update as necessary. Users can make changes directly to the spreadsheet here.

If you're not in the census and you'd like to be listed, please read on.

As with prior versions, the list is meant to cover individual law professor accounts only (not accounts of groups, programs, blogs, law schools, print publications, students, practitioners, staff).  Folks should be full-time law school faculty members (not, say, law-trained profs working in business schools or lawyers working in law schools in roles other than full-time faculty). Law profs outside the U.S. very, very welcome. Anonymous and pseudonymous accounts are not eligible for inclusion.

The downloadable, sortable spreadsheet can be edited directly by accessing this link. If you’d like to add your name, or if you would like to add to or modify your existing listing in census, the census calls for:

(a) Your name

(b) Your handle on Twitter X, Meta, Blue Sky, Mastodon, or any other social networking site

(c) Your school affiliation

(d) Up to three subject-matter areas of interest that related to your teaching, scholarship or tweeting.

Here are customary responses to some anticipated questions from inquiring minds who want to know:

1.  How was the census developed?

The list is based on previous censuses. I have added or deleted very few names myself, based on law prof accounts that I have happened to encounter (typically because they follow me on a platform or I follow them) or if I knew someone had changed schools, left the academy, etc. I have made no concerted effort to update the list myself.

2.  How accurate is the census?

Not at all.

If there are corrections, additions, etc., please feel free to make them directly to the spreadsheet.  As a last resort, you can email me directly at bcrawford at law dot pace dot edu.  The deadline for changes is October 16, 2023, 5pm eastern. I'll republish again shortly thereafter via posting here on the Lounge, and then not again until next year, most likely.

3. Why isn't my information listed in the census? Why isn't my colleague's information listed?

The census relies almost exclusively on self-identification. To be included in the list, you must actively add yourself to it or update your own information.

4. Why is your list limited to full-time law school faculty members?

Because that's the population about which I wanted to capture data. Want a different survey? A better one? Feel free to start one, and I'm happy to publicize it here, if relevant to legal education.

The current census is embedded below, too (but edit via links above).

Updated Submission Guide for Law Review Online Companions

Submission season is upon us.  Inspired by Allan Rostron and Nancy Levit's useful law review submission guide (here), I've updated my copycat guide to submitting shorter pieces to online companions, covering 60+ schools.

Some take-aways, consistent with prior years:

(1) Scholastica continues to be the preferred delivery system for submissions.

(2) Most companion journals are included in the HeinOnline Law Journal Library.

(3) The length of pieces that online journals accept varies widely.

You can download the Information for Submitting to Online Law Review Companions here.

Some take-aways, consistent with prior years:

(1) Scholastica continues to be the preferred delivery system for submissions.

(2) Most companion journals are included in the HeinOnline Law Journal Library.

(3) The length of pieces that online journals accept varies widely.

You can download the Information for Submitting to Online Law Review Companions here.

Advice from Gender & Law Journal Editors: Tips for Prospective Authors—US Feminist Judgments Webinar 1/20/23

Advice from Gender & Law Journal Editors: Tips for Prospective Authors

Live Zoom Webinar Sponsored by the U.S. Feminist Judgments Project

January 20, 2023 2-3 pm Eastern/11am-12n Pacific

advance registration required (here; free)

Specialty law journals are important outlets for legal scholars working on gender-related issues. What are gender journal editors looking for when they review articles? How can authors improve their chances of receiving an offer of publication? What is the best time to submit an article to a gender journal? What role do the author’s cover letter and CV play in the selection process? Hear from current student editors at three journals—the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, the Michigan Journal of Gender & Law, and the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism—with answers to these questions along with advice and tips for navigating the submission process. 

 

Moderators: Bridget J. Crawford (Pace) & Kathryn M. Stanchi (UNLV)

 

Participating Editors: Renée Mihail, Yale Law ’24; Hannah Mezzacapa, Michigan Law ’23; Addie Davies, Harvard Law ‘23

 

The webinar is free  and open to all with pre-registation (here). The event is co-sponsored by the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University and the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, together with The Feminism and Legal Theory Project, The Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative, the Institute for Feminist Legal Studies at Osgoode, and the AALS Section on Women in Legal Education.

 

Information for Submitting to Online Law Review Companions

Now updated to include online law review companions at 45 schools, here. (Expanded from July 22 version that included only 20 publications.)

Data Visualization Tools to Pump Up That Law Review Article?

Some interesting data visualization ideas from the SEO company Moz, here.

Apart from the expected promotion of the company's own products, I learned about some free Google tools that I didn't know about, as well as the free version of Tableau Public.

I know that lots of folks in the legal academy already have strong abilities to present data persuasively and well (Ryan Whalen, I see you!). Beyond making a nice bar chart in Excel, though, my own skills are limited. I'm interested to give these new tools a try!

The Feminist Legal Theory Project's Search for an Archival Home:

Earlier this week, Ms. Magazine published an article (here) revealing the somewhat surprising decision of the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University to decline the records of the Feminism and Legal Theory Project, begun at the University of Wisconsin in 1984 and still going strong at Emory University, under the leadership of path-breaking scholar Professor Martha Fineman.  Here's an excerpt from the story:

For close to four decades, Fineman’s Feminism and Legal Theory Project has hosted hundreds of conversations where feminist thinkers from across the United States and world have shaped and explored a wide range of concepts relating to women’s position within law and society. Those conversations delved into the “public nature of private violence,” the legal regulation of motherhood, feminism’s reception in the media, the relevance of economics to feminist thought, the complexities of sexuality, conflicting children’s and parental rights, the origins and implications of dependency and vulnerability, and the extent and nature of social responsibility. ***

Out of these conversations emerged the first anthology of feminist legal theory, At the Boundaries of Law, published in 1991. Many more followed, including over a dozen collections, numerous special issues of law reviews and hundreds of individual articles developing an interdisciplinary approach to feminist legal theory.

“In the Feminism and Legal Theory Project, we created what I called ‘uncomfortable conversations’—events where people who shared values, but disagreed about strategies and implementation, could talk,” said Fineman. “If there were areas of disagreement around collective objectives, you could talk about them and work through them hopefully in a constructive manner. That’s how actual progress can be made.” ***

Fineman recorded all of these conversations—a treasure trove of close to four decades of feminist intellectual history. But she is now struggling to find a home for this invaluable archive of the first generation of feminist legal thinkers.

“History has something to teach us. If we don’t collect the history and preserve it, then it can’t teach us,” said Fineman.

The Schlesinger Library at Harvard University is one of the few facilities that currently has the resources to care for the Fineman’s collection, but they told her that although they saw its value, they would not take her archives because they had other priorities. According to Fineman, a representative from Harvard told her: “We do see the real importance of the conferences, the ideas generated, and know it is an important resource for scholars. Unfortunately, it doesn’t align with our current strategic priorities, which involve a heightened focus on lives of women of color. We wouldn’t be able to commit the resources the archives need to its care.”

Others archives, including the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History at Smith College, the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University and the Pembroke Center Archives at Brown University, indicated they have other priorities (e.g. Smith is prioritizing papers related to sex workers’ rights while Duke “does not focus on the papers of legal scholars”) or they do not have the resources or technical capacity to house the collection.

“Some people are telling me the size of the collection is prohibitive,” said Fineman. “They talk about the necessity to digitize everything initially—but then explain that current technology will need ongoing updating, and this will all add to the cost, ironically decreasing the amount of material that they can actually collect.”

Read the full story here.

Submission Guide for Law Review Online Companions

Submission season is upon us.  Inspired by Allan Rostron and Nancy Levit's most recent update to their useful law review submission guide (here), I've updated my copycat guide to submitting shorter piece to the online companions at 20 top journals.

Some take-aways:

(1) More of the online journals are gravitating toward Scholastica for submissions (and from what I can tell, the big beneficiary of that move is that company's owners).

(2) Wash U Law Review Online is the only companion journal not yet included in the HeinOnline Law Journal Library, but expect that to change in the future.

(3) The length of pieces that online journals accept varies widely.

You can download the Information for Submitting to Online Law Review Companions here.

 

Updated Guide to Submitting to Online Law Review Companions

As the law review submission season has begun (I've already received a rejection on an article), I've updated the Information for Submitting to Online Law Review Companions. The latest version is here and covers only the top 20 main law reviews that receive shorter pieces like essays, book reviews, etc. I'll expand the list's coverage as I have time.

The  materials are modeled after the chart for law review article submissions prepared by Professor Allen Rostron and Professor Nancy Levit at the University of Missouri Kansas City School of Law.

This chart is for submissions to online companions of main law reviews and journals at the top 20 schools (as determined by the most recent US News overall ranking, not because that system merits endorsement, but because it is convenient).  Specifically, the chart derives from the journals’ websites the following information:

• Name of the online journal
• Word count limitation, if any
• Subject matter limitations, if any
• Preferred essay/commentary/review submission method
• Whether articles from online journal are included in HeinOnline’s Law Journal Library
• Other information of possible interest to authors.

The online companions accept a variety of different shorter pieces.

For further information concerning the rankings of the journals and their associated law schools, please consult the source of your choosing.  Some colleagues find the Washington & Lee law review rankings website helpful. That site is here.

LSA Announcment on Now-Defunct USNWR Legal Scholarship Rankings

Readers might be interested in the recent announcement by the Law and Society Association about the now-defunct USNWR legal scholarship ranking plans. Although no one can know precisely what caused Bob Morse's turn-around, LSA's efforts on this issue were valuable.

Here is an excerpt from LSA's announcement:

The Law and Society Association is pleased to report that the U.S. News and World Report has decided not to proceed with its proposal to add a measure of “scholarly impact” to its law school rankings. This report summarizes the Association’s concerns and actions taken while the metric was under consideration.

The proposed metric for measuring scholarly impact was to be drawn from citations in the Hein database which is comprised primarily of law review articles. The Law & Society Association was concerned with the implications for our members, many of whom write books, book chapters and peer-reviewed articles that appear in and are frequently cited in publications other than law reviews. For that reason, the scholarly impact of our members’ scholarship would not have been accurately represented in the proposed metric. In addition, non-doctrinal and data- driven sociolegal scholarship ordinarily does not amass as many citations as constitutional or purely doctrinal articles do. Moreover, if law schools attempted to game the system to improve their rankings, as has happened with other U.S. News metrics, the intellectual, interdisciplinary, and racial diversity of law school faculties and the range of topics they choose to write on might have been negatively affected.... LSA was not alone in our effort to ensure the unbiasedness and soundness of the U.S. News rankings or to see the project cancelled if obstacles were too big to overcome. The Association is grateful for the extensive work of U.S. law librarians who were deeply engaged with U.S. News and Hein about the difficulties they discovered with the various proposed approaches to a legal scholarship ranking.

The full announcement is here.

H/T Elizabeth Mertz

Future Business Law Professors Conference @Villanova_Law

Future Business Law Professors Conference

Presented by the John F. Scarpa Center for Entrepreneurship and Law

Friday, September 10, 2021 9:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m. Virtual Event

The John F. Scarpa Center for Entrepreneurship and Law will host the second Future Business Law Professors Conference on Friday, September 10. All visiting assistant professors, fellows, researchers, law clerks, practitioners and others who are considering entering the higher education academic teaching market in business law—including business associations, securities regulation, corporate finance and business ethics—are invited to attend. This year’s conference will be virtual.

Participants will learn more about the business law teaching market, receive advice on how to be a successful candidate and meet future colleagues. Attendees will have the opportunity to participate in mock interviews and get a sneak-peak into the hiring process from current business law faculty. Some will be able to present their job talk paper to leaders in the field and receive feedback.

Faculty from University of Colorado Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, George Washington University Law School, University of Michigan Law School, University of Nebraska College of Law, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, University of Pittsburgh School of Law, Rutgers Law School, Temple University Beasley School of Law and Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law are scheduled to participate.

Please note registration is required. Attendees will receive an email from Eventbrite with the Zoom link on the day of the event. Registration is here.

Updated Guide for Submission of Law Review Articles to Specialty Law Reviews and Journals in Gender, Women & Sexuality

I have updated my "Information for Submitting to Specialty Law Reviews and Journals in Gender, Women & Sexuality." The most recent version dated July 13, 2021 is here.

The guide is modeled after the chart prepared by Professor Allen Rostron and Professor Nancy Levit at the University of Missouri Kansas City School of Law, and after my Information for Submitting to Online Law Review Companions. It contains information about twenty-seven (27) U.S.-based law reviews and journals classified under the subject “Gender, Women and Sexuality and Law” by the Washington & Lee Law Journal Rankings (here) or that are broadly related to social justice and five (5) additional journals that contain the word “gender” in their title, but are not listed in the Washington & Lee Law Journal Rankings.  Within each category (W&L-ranked journals, then non-ranked journals) journals are listed in the order of the “rank” of the school, if any (as determined by the most recent US News overall ranking, not because that system merits endorsement, but because it is convenient).  Specifically, the chart derives from the journals’ websites the following information:

• Name of the specialty journal
• Word count limitation, if any
• Preferred submission method
• Whether articles from online journal are included in HeinOnline’s Law Journal Library
• Other information of possible interest to authors
• US News ranking of affiliated school, if any
• W&L Law Journal Ranking within category of “Gender, Women and Sexuality,” by “combined” score for 2020 (most recent year available).

Corrections and updates are welcome.

What Should Go in the Conclusion to a Law Review Article?

Ellen Muehleberger (@emuehleb), Professor of History and Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan, posted to Twitter a list of advice for her students about what should go in the conclusion of a scholarly paper in History. Many of her tips seem equally helpful for law review articles, too. Here are a few of Professor Meuhlberger's suggestions:

• take a piece of evidence used early in the paper and revisit it, re-reading it under the new analysis that developed over the course of the paper
• zoom out, taking the reader to a concept or method you haven't talked about yet, but that now needs to be thought of differently because of what you've written, and explain that
• zoom in, looking just at the small field/era/geography you've covered, and make clear where your argument sits among the work of three other people writing on that small field/era/geography
• make a list of the things you weren't able to do in the paper, then turn that list into a set of explorations you suggest are now possible for the reader to take up

The full thread is unrolled here.

The Ethics of Forwarding an Outside Colleague's Paper to One's Home Law Review

In an old Ethicist column from 2018 at the New York Times, Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU) addressed a reader's question about the practice of asking one's law faculty friends at other schools to forward the "outsider's" paper to the student law review editors at the recipient's home institution. Here's an excerpt from the reader's question:

In recent years, a practice has developed in which authors send their manuscripts to friends on other law faculties and ask them to recommend their paper for publication to the editors of their school’s law journal. Law students understandably feel pressure to defer to the professors who give them grades and who are far more experienced.

I don’t know how common the practice is, though I suspect that many authors who submit to law reviews are unaware of it. On the positive side, the practice means that a professor vets the article. And it is no different from the common practice of using your connections to get ahead. * * *

In short, to the extent law-review placements are thought to be a statement about the quality of the article — a view that, despite what I say above, I find hard to shake in myself — a result of this practice is that placements may send a misleading signal about the article. That has not stopped me from engaging in it once or twice. Did I behave unethically? Is it relevant that students are involved?

Appiah's response doesn't quite address the reader's question (and I myself am not sure if the reader was a sender or a forwarder of the law review article), but here's Appiah's take:

As you’ve made clear, the practice of faculty recommendation puts pressures on law-review editors that may involve the abuse of power, temptations to toady and a host of other unfortunate effects. . . . [S]ome meliorative steps can be taken. Law reviews could adopt an explicit policy that they will not consider articles sent to them via the faculty of their own institution. Indeed, they could simply circulate a letter to their own faculty asking them not to do this. 

H/T Leandra Lederman.

Over on Twitter (here), Leandra Lederman (Indiana Maurer) explains her policy of declining any requests to forward colleagues' articles to her home institution's law review, for fear of putting the proverbial "thumb on the scale for a friend," thereby putting uncomfortable pressure on students.

My guess is that practices and views depend on multiple variables, including the relative "rank" of the sender's and receiver's home institutions (and associated issues of perceived prestige or quality) in some cases. It's a tricky issue, for sure. Until reading the thread on Twitter, I hadn't considered the unintended pressure that these sorts of forwards might place on the receiving student editors vis-à-vis the faculty at their school. Again, that may depend on many factors, but the student perspective makes me think about the issue in a new way.

 

Continue reading the main story

 

 

Scholastica Data on 2020 Submissions

Scholastica has made available here information about the submissions made via that platform in 2020. A few facts caught my eye:

"Only 35% of law reviews using Scholastica actively open/close submissions across the year – the other 65% remain open for submissions year-round, much like traditional peer-reviewed journals that have year-round rolling review."

Technically speaking, it may be that 65% of the law reviews remain "open" year-round on Scholastica, but this does not mean the journals are accepting/reading submissions. Anecdotally speaking (aka based onto the abyss into which I have sent several articles), my sense is that the 65% number does not mean that 65% of journals are open. Rather, a large number of journals just haven't clicked the button to indicate that they are full/not accepting/not reading. Perhaps from the journal's perspective, staying open means it may receive an off-season gem. More likely, it's a financial gain for Scholastica in the form of fees paid on articles submitted and never read.

"The majority of articles, around 80% in total, are sent to law reviews in the six weeks following February 1 and the six weeks following August 1."

Familiar news, but always interesting to see the underlying data in graphic form (from here):

And finally:

"Most decisions are made from February to the end of April and then August through the end of October – though there are still some decisions made outside those periods."

Here's Scholastica's graphic on when the journals make decisions:

This seems to follow conventional wisdom that the February cycle is more active than the August one, but that there still remains a fall cycle.

A few years ago, Brian Galle posted some reflections (over here, on Medium). His assessment? "[T]he fall sucks...only about a third of acceptances happen in the fall." The fall cycle does appear less robust than the February cycle.

All obvious to many experienced submitters, but helpful data for those newer to the process.

Updated Guide to Submitting to Specialty Law Reviews and Journals in Gender, Women & Sexuality

I’ve updated this guide to submitting to 29 specialty law reviews and law journals classified by the W&L Law Journal Rankings under the subject  “Gender, Women and Sexuality,” as well as  5 additional journals with the word “gender” in the title. 

The document contains information about word count limitations, submission details, whether the HeinOnline Law Journal Library indexes the journal’s articles, and other guidelines authors may find relevant when considering sending their work to specialty law reviews in Gender, Women & Sexuality.

Details vary widely from journal to journal. Not all journals accept unsolicited contributions (or are still in existence!).

Corrections, additions, refinements are very welcome.

Updated Guide to Submitting Essays, Commentaries, Reviews to Online Law Review Companions

I've updated and expanded my guide to submitting to online law review companions at 60 law schools. It is here on SSRN. 

As before, the document contains information about word count limitations, subject matter preferences, submission details and other guidelines authors may find relevant when considering sending their work to law review presences online. There's a column indicating whether the online companion articles are included in the HeinOnline Law Journal Library.

Corrections, additions, refinements to this chart are always welcome.