Submit Articles to the Peer-Reviewed Journal of Free Speech Law

We will review it quickly, and, if we accept it, publish it quickly.

Nearly all the top law reviews are closed for the Summer, as are about half of all the general-interest American law journals of all ranks. But we're open, and can publish your article as early as August; that means you can publish with us close to a year earlier than you can publish with most student journals. Indeed, if you wait for the Fall submission cycle when most journals will reopen, you won't be able to submit to those journals until August, the month in which you could already be published with us.

We do expect exclusive submission, but that should be easy for authors when the other journals are on break; and we promise an answer within two weeks, a promise we've consistently kept. So please submit an anonymized draft via Scholastica here.

And we're also offering a modest amount of reviewer feedback—constructive, we hope—if the article is rejected, something most other law reviews don't do. So submit now; submission guidelines are at JournalOfFreeSpeechLaw.org. We accept articles from all sorts of authors; we neither exclude submissions from law students or other non-lawyer/non-law-professors nor offer them any separate publication track.

Our first issue will be a symposium on social media platform regulation, scheduled to be out in July; ten prominent scholars will be publishing their articles.

Comments

[Aladdin's Carpet]

“we neither exclude submissions from law students or other non-lawyer/non-law-professors nor offer them any separate publication track.”

So if Mr. Behar were to compile all his screeds and submit them …

[DaivdBehar]

Al. It would not make much of an article, being summed up in two simple sentences.

Try reading the simple high school language of the constitution. Stop making shit up for rent seeking, lawless, treasonous, self dealing purposes.

There might be a footnote referencing Article I Section 1.

[DaivdBehar]

Al. A review of a mandamus of the Non-Profit Office of the IRS to pull the exemption of any entity committing the slightest viewpoint discrimination might be preparation for real world action. Someone would have to file it who has standing.

The taxpayer should have standing, but has been stupidly and arbitrarily excluded by the biased, big government, traitors on the federal bench. That tax exemption is sending my money to dirty Commies to promote their attack on our American Way of Life. Revisiting taxpayer standing would also be worthwhile. These Commies are stealing $trillion.

[Don Nico]

Charity forbids mocking the Behar.

[DaivdBehar]

Donnie. Didn’t you pass 1L? A TBI with a month in a coma, on life support, would have been far less damaging. Look at what that did to Volokh.

[Don Nico]

Charity demands not mocking the Behar

[DaivdBehar]

Donnie. Don’t start that idiotic, Commie, cockatoo stuff too. Be more lawyerly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f8xnaDIAow

[DaivdBehar]

And, Volokh, don’t be sending any nasty emails. Send them to the bird.

[Don Nico]

It’s Nico to you, Behar.

[DaivdBehar]

Do you prefer Mr. or Ms.?

[Dr. Ed 2]

You allow anonymous submission — do you also allow anonymous publication? While it is in a different context, I’m thinking of the book “Unprotected” which was initially published anonymously.

See: https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1595230459/reasonmagazinea-20/

[Don Nico]

Where do you see that anonymous submission is allowed?
That would place this well outside the practice of academic peer-reviewed journals.

[Eugene Volokh]

1. We ask for an anonymized draft, so that we can send it to the reviewers; we do know the authors’ names, though, since they come through via the Scholastica submission system.

2. We don’t envision publishing anonymous articles, since that is indeed not the norm, and since most authors want the credit.

3. We are in principle open to publishing an anonymous article, if we think there is a strong enough reason for it, and no strong specific reasons against it. (Cf. William Gosset, who published his statistical research under the pen name “Student.”) We do need to know the author’s name ourselves, though, so we can check to make sure there aren’t any strong reasons against such anonymous publication.

[Don Nico]

An anonymyzed draft to obtain a blind review makes sense. Presumable in the published article authors and others to who who acknowledgement is due are published.” After all authorship and acknowledgement is part of the reward system for academic journals.
If you publish an anonymous manuscript ; then the reaership should have a published means of contacting the author(s). That is also standard in “academic” journals.

[Dr. Ed 2]

My bad — I thought that “anonymized” meant “anonymous” as that is what the word means, particularly in terms of “anonymized data” relative to FERPA and other privacy laws.

I’m thinking that you might get some very interesting articles written by attorneys employed in various bureaucracies saying things that wouldn’t be good for their careers to publicly state. I’d actually encourage you to have a stated policy on that, including the extent to which you will (or won’t) keep the author’s name confidential even if you refuse to publish it anonymously.

And when you won’t. You likely will get the occasional nut sending in stuff that you ethically (and perhaps legally) are required to forward to the authorities, along with things that may raise bar ethics duties — and it’s easier to think about this ahead of time.

For example: Every couple of years, every college newspaper in the country gets a request to purchase advertising space from a rabid Holocaust-denying kook — but the letter and the proposed advertisement actually look rational. (I’ve seen it, it is a professionally written letter and what looks like an innocent advertisement, albeit with a lot of ambiguous statements in it.)

While we didn’t do it, occasionally a college newspaper will print the ad, at which point the bleep hits the fan because once you think “Holocaust”, that ad looks completely different…

[bernard11]

When I first encountered Student’s T in an introductory statistics class, I thought it was some simplified version, with training wheels, of the real “grown-up” T-test, to which we would move after developing our balance.

Am I the only one?

[Aladdin's Carpet]

“So please submit an anonymized draft via Scholastica here.”

I would imagine they verify your identity for publication however.

[Don Nico]

Thanks, AC

[gormadoc]

Rejected law articles don’t get reviewer feedback? Why is that?