Tonight I attended the “Stanford-Harvard-Yale Joint Journal Information Session” billed as follows:
Description: Wondering how to submit to the Stanford Law Review, Harvard Law Review, or Yale Law Journal? Join our live Q&A webinar next week, January 31 at 4:00 PM PT/7:00 PM ET. This joint session, co-hosted by the outgoing Articles Chairs of all three journals, will answer your questions about the nuts and bolts of the article selection process. The event aims to increase transparency and encourage submissions, so will be centered around your questions and concerns. We particularly encourage young scholars, first-time authors, scholars of color, and other diverse scholars to attend. We can’t wait to see you there!
The program was informative and I’m grateful to the students for their time. I’ve never had an article advance very far in the process at any of those three journals, but I figured I’d log on and try to learn something. Hope springs eternal, right? Judging by the questions from the audience, many people found the session informative and helpful.
What did I learn? The journals have some similar practices. Some issues they handle differently. Here are some of my main take-aways (idiosyncratic to me; I was not trying to take detailed notes):
Observations Across All Three Journals
- What good is an “exclusive” submission? Well, it may give the students a head start on processing your article, but it does not mean that the article will necessarily be fast-tracked.
- The students do say they look at every article and take preemption and peer review seriously.
- The journals are take seriously anonymity and peer review.
- The journals try to respond to expedite requests as best they can, but turn-arounds of hours or a few days are almost impossible to accommodate.
Yale Law Journal
- Yale’s “fall” submissions seasons runs from approximately July 15 through the end of the first week in August.
- They don’t read cover letters or resume (because they are too busy with the articles). You can include these materials, but they won’t be read.
- So what’s the “extra” document upload on the YLJ site for? Appendices to empirical pieces, mostly.
- If you get to final board review, your chances of acceptance are roughly 10%.
Harvard Law Review
- If you get to final board review, your chances of acceptance are roughly 50%.
- The journal will consider proposals for book reviews (or completed book reviews, but they don’t get many) in April.
- The journal receives submissions every day of the year, but they have especially robust submission/review cycles approximately February 1 to mid-April and then again August 1 to mid-September.
Stanford Law Review
- If you get to final board review, your chances of acceptance are roughly 10%.
- If you submit an article “exclusively” to Stanford, they assume you are not submitting to any other journal. You can let them know the submission is exclusive via Scholastica.
- They don’t read cover letters or resume (because they are too busy with the articles). You can include these materials, but they won’t be read.
- They start reviewing when their portal opens and stop reviewing around the first week of March. There is another week after their quarter ends–around March 21–but otherwise, they will be done reviewing for the academic year at the end of March.
- The students leave about 7 slots for articles to be accepted in the fall cycle.
- The Stanford Law review looks for two kinds of articles: “hawks” and “owls.” “Hawks” are “sexy and innovative.” “Owls” take a fresh look at a more familiar topic.
The “sexy” reference for scholarship was completely cringeworthy. I assume only good intentions on the part of the students–the desire to convey enthusiasm for articles with new perspectives and original topics. But we all can do better than using terms like “sexy” to describe excellent scholarship. The term is lazy, sensationalist and unnecessarily sexual.
