To submit to a law journal, you prepare a manuscript (with an abstract, cover letter, and CV), run a preemption check to confirm your thesis is still novel, and send it through Scholastica to a strategic range of journals during one of two submission windows: late January through April, or August through early October. If a journal makes an offer, you use it to request expedited review from higher-ranked journals before accepting, withdrawing from everywhere else, and signing a publication agreement.
The sequence below walks through each step in the order it actually happens.
Start With a Preemption Check
Before you invest months in a draft, confirm no one has already published the argument you plan to make. Preemption happens two ways: another author beat you to the same thesis, or a new court decision or statute resolved the question you intended to address. Search legal databases for published articles on your topic, check SSRN for working papers that haven’t appeared in print yet, and review recent case law and legislation.
Run the check at least twice: once before you begin writing and again just before you submit. Your topic doesn’t need to be entirely novel, but your thesis does. Finding that someone else has written in the same area doesn’t kill your project. It means your argument has to go somewhere theirs didn’t.
Prepare the Manuscript
Expected article length varies by journal. Some accept pieces as short as 10,000 words including footnotes; others prefer manuscripts in the 20,000-to-30,000-word range.1University of California, Irvine School of Law. Scholar Submissions – UC Irvine Law Review2New York University Law Review. Submissions Check the submission guidelines for your target journals before drafting; cutting 10,000 words after the fact is painful.
A standard submission package includes:
- The manuscript itself, formatted to the journal’s requirements and anonymized if the journal requires blind review.
- An abstract summarizing the thesis and main arguments.
- A cover letter addressed to the articles editor, stating the word count and highlighting the piece’s contribution to existing scholarship.
- A current CV establishing your professional and academic background.
Online companion journals operate on a different scale. Pieces there typically run 6,000 to 10,000 words and can appear within weeks of submission, which makes them a strong fit for timely responses to a new case or statute.
Know the Submission Windows
Timing is one of the least obvious parts of this process and one of the most important. The main submission window runs from late January through April. Most major journals open around February 1, with the busiest activity in mid-to-late February. By mid-April, many top-tier and mid-tier journals have filled their volumes for the year.
A smaller second window opens from August through early October for journals with remaining slots or different publication schedules. Submitting outside these windows means most editorial boards simply won’t review your work.
Submit Through Scholastica
Scholastica is the dominant submission platform, used by the vast majority of student-edited law reviews. As of 2026, it charges $7.35 per law review submission and $10 per scholarly journal submission.3Scholastica. How Much Do Submissions Cost? The platform lets you search journals by subject area, submit to multiple journals at once, send anonymized files where required, and track responses from a central dashboard.4Scholastica. The Law Review Submissions Center Some institutions subsidize Scholastica fees for their faculty, and fee waivers are available for authors experiencing financial hardship.
Simultaneous submission to many journals is standard practice for student-edited law reviews. Some authors submit to dozens of journals in a single batch. Build the batch strategically: include a range of journal tiers so that an offer from a lower-ranked journal gives you something to leverage with higher-ranked ones.
Peer-reviewed journals follow different rules. Many prohibit simultaneous submission and require exclusivity during their review period. Always read the individual journal’s policy before clicking send.
Use an Offer to Request Expedited Review
When a journal offers to publish your article, you can use that offer to request expedited review from higher-ranked journals. This is the most strategically consequential part of the process, and experienced legal scholars plan for it from the start by including a range of journal tiers in their initial submission batch. Through Scholastica, expedite requests go directly into editors’ workflows rather than sitting in an email inbox.4Scholastica. The Law Review Submissions Center
Give journals enough time. A requesting journal typically needs seven to ten days to conduct a meaningful review.5Florida State University Law Review. Expedited Review Requests Harvard Law Review and several peer journals have committed to giving every author at least seven days to decide whether to accept any offer.6Harvard Law Review. Submissions Setting unreasonably short deadlines, or repeatedly shortening them, burns goodwill with editors. If a journal can’t meet your timeline, most will simply stop reviewing the piece rather than rush a decision.
One ranking note that matters here: journal rank is not a single number. The Washington and Lee Law Journal Rankings database and similar tools measure total citation count, impact factor, and subject-area influence separately. A journal ranked 50th overall can be the leading publication in its specialty, and an offer from that specialty leader is often worth more to a subject-matter expert than a slot in a higher-ranked general review. Keep that in mind when deciding which offers to use for expediting and which to accept.
Accept, Withdraw, and Sign the Agreement
Once you accept an offer, withdraw your manuscript from every other journal immediately. Failing to do so wastes editorial resources and damages your reputation in what turns out to be a small professional community.
The final step is signing a publication agreement, which determines who owns the copyright to your article. Practices vary. Research has found that only a minority of law journals require authors to transfer copyright entirely. Many journals instead ask for a license to publish while allowing the author to retain ownership. Some agreements permit the author to post the final article on SSRN or a personal website after publication; others impose an embargo period.
If keeping the right to share your work matters to you, read the agreement carefully before signing. Open-access journals sometimes use Creative Commons licenses that let others share or build on the work under specified conditions, with CC BY (any reuse with attribution) and CC BY-NC (noncommercial reuse) the most common choices. If your research is funded by a grant, check whether the funder’s open-access policy requires a specific license type.
After signing, student editors move the piece into a technical editing phase, verifying every citation in your manuscript. That process can stretch over several months before the article appears in print.
A Note on Joining a Law Review as a Student
If you’re a law student looking to join a journal rather than publish in one as an outside author, the process is different. Membership typically requires strong first-year grades, a successful write-on competition held the summer after 1L year, or both. Write-on packets include source materials, a short analytical paper (usually a case comment composed only from the provided materials), and a Bluebook editing exercise, with roughly two weeks to complete the whole thing. Members then produce their own student scholarship, either a note (close analysis of a recent decision or narrow question) or a comment (broader analysis of an area of law or recent development). The submission guidance above applies to finished articles going out to journals, not to the internal membership track.