Stanford Law Review

Articles

Electronic Submissions: The Stanford Law Review strongly prefers to receive submissions of article manuscripts through our website. Please click here to submit a manuscript for consideration. Articles submitted through our website receive our fastest consideration.

Paper Submissions: While electronic submissions are preferred, paper submissions are also accepted. Please do not submit your article by mail if you have also submitted the article through our website. Please include your e-mail address with your submission, as acknowledgements and decisions will be transmitted by e-mail. Please send manuscripts to:

Senior Articles Editor
Stanford Law Review
Crown Quadrangle
559 Nathan Abbott Way
Stanford, CA 94305-8610

We regret that such manuscripts cannot be returned.

Manuscript Specifications: Please do not include your name or other identifying information on your manuscript itself. For electronic submissions, please enter your name and identifying information in the designated form fields when you upload your article onto the Stanford Law Review website. For paper submissions, please include all identifying information in a detachable cover letter. Removing this identifying information from the article itself speeds up the journal?s consideration of your submission by facilitating blind review.

Please include a brief abstract of your submission with the text. Resumes and biographical information are not required.

The text and citations of the Review generally conform to The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (18th ed. 2005), copyright by the Columbia Law Review Association, the Harvard Law Review Association, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review , and the Yale Law Journal.

Article length: The Stanford Law Review considers submissions of all lengths, but gives preference to articles of fewer than 30,000 words. The law review is among the 15 leading law reviews joining the statement below:

"In mid-December, the Harvard Law Review conducted a nationwide survey of law faculty regarding the state of legal scholarship. Nearly 800 professors completed the survey and submitted their feedback. Complete tabulations of the survey will soon be available on the web. Importantly, the survey documented one particularly unambiguous view shared by faculty and law review editors alike: the length of articles has become excessive. In fact, nearly 90% of faculty agreed that articles are too long. In addition, dozens of respondents submitted specific comments, identifying the dangers of this trend and calling for action. Survey respondents suggested that shorter articles would enhance the quality of legal scholarship, shorten and improve the editing process, and render articles more effective and easier to read.

"The law reviews listed above are very grateful for the constructive feedback and wish to acknowledge a role in contributing to this unfortunate trend in legal scholarship. To the extent that the article selection or editing process encourages the submission and publication of lengthier articles, each of the law reviews listed above is committed to rethinking and modifying its policies as necessary. Indeed, some have already done so. The vast majority of law review articles can effectively convey their arguments within the range of 40-70 pages, and any impression that law reviews only publish or strongly prefer lengthier articles should be dispelled. Ultimately, individual law reviews will have to decide for themselves how best to resolve these concerns. Please know, however, that editors across the country are cognizant of the troubling trend toward longer articles and are actively exploring how to address it."

Ethics Policy: In the past few decades, legal scholarship has increased in sophistication, depth, scale, and volume. While the Bluebook rigorously governs methods of citation, law reviews have generally lagged in adopting similar standards for documentation of empirical data, the most important source in empirical works. Similarly, law reviews have been unique in failing to articulate basic ethics standards. These failures threaten the validity, credibility, prestige and potential of student-run law reviews. To address these concerns, the Stanford Law Review henceforth conditions its acceptance of articles upon satisfaction of the following requirements.

(I) Replication Policy: At a minimum, empirical works must document and archive all datasets so that third parties may replicate the published findings. These datasets will be published on our website. The Law Review will make narrow exceptions on a case-by-case basis, particularly if the datasets involve issues of confidentiality and/or privacy.

(II) Peer Review: Peer review not only enhances an article’s quality, but guarantees originality. Submissions will be subject to peer review, albeit in a form amenable to the typical law review selection timeframes.

(III) Conflict of Interest: All authors must disclose any conflict of interest. This includes any financial interest that may be affected by the results or conclusions in the submission. This also includes any source of outside funding for the submission that may have affected or biased the assumptions, results or conclusions in the submission – e.g., any payment received by an outside organization to complete the work. If the funding helped pay for the expenses associated with a project (travel, data compilation, simulations, etc), we simply ask that the connection be noted and the organization thanked. IMPORTANT: We do not, however, publish pieces for which the author was paid taxable income by an organization other than the relevant employer – i.e., income from an outside organization or corporation that simply went to the author, rather than funding the expenses of a project.

Please address any additional questions about the submissions process to Sina Kian, Senior Articles Editor, at articles[at]stanfordlawreview.org. Please do not e-mail submissions to this address.