Submit Your Articles to the Journal of Free Speech Law, Before You Circulate Them to the Law Reviews

We'll give you an answer within 14 days, and we can publish them within several weeks, if you'd like.

Our peer-reviewed Journal of Free Speech Law, which is now four years old, has published over 100 articles, including by Jack Balkin (Yale), Mark Lemley (Stanford), Jane Ginsburg (Columbia), Philip Hamburger (Columbia), Christopher Yoo (Penn), and many others—both prominent figures in the field and emerging young scholars, including ones who didn't have a tenure-track academic appointment. (This list doesn't include our reprinting others' symposia, which have also included many other top scholars, such as Robert Post, Mark Tushnet, Geoffrey Stone, Lee Bollinger, Jeremy Waldron, Danielle Citron, Genevieve Lakier, and more.) The articles have been cited so far in 11 court cases, over 325 articles, and at least 100 briefs. And note that all the articles have only had four years or less to attract these citations.

I expect that many authors are planning to submit articles on free speech to the usual law reviews when the submission cycle restarts in August. But if you submit exclusively to us before that, we will give you an answer within 14 days; and then if you'd like to have it published quickly, we can publish it in within several weeks, if it's sufficiently clean and cite-checked by your research assistant. This means your article can be published by us, if it's accepted, almost a year (or more) before it would be published by the law journals.

Of course, also please pass this along to friends or colleagues who you think might be interested. Note that the submissions don't compete for a limited number of slots in an issue or volume; we'll publish articles that satisfy our quality standards whenever we get them.

All submissions must be exclusive to us, but, again, you'll have an answer within 14 days, so you'll be able to submit elsewhere if we say no. Please submit an anonymized draft, together with at https://freespeechlaw.scholasticahq.com/. A few guidelines:

• Instead of a cover letter, please submit at most one page (and preferably just a paragraph or two) explaining how your article is novel. If there is a particular way of showing that (e.g., it's the first article to discuss how case X and doctrine Y interact), please let us know.
• Please submit articles single-spaced, in a proportionally spaced font.
• Please make sure that the Introduction quickly and clearly explains the main claims you are making.
• Please avoid extended background sections reciting familiar Supreme Court precedents or other well-known matters. We prefer articles that get right down to the novel material (if necessary, quickly explaining the necessary legal principles as they go).
• Each article should be as short as possible, and as long as necessary.
• Like everyone else, we like simple, clear, engaging writing.
• We are open to student-written work, and we evaluate it under the same standards applicable to work written by others.

We publish:

1. Articles that say something we don't already know.
2. Articles with all sorts of approaches: doctrinal, theoretical, historical, empirical, or otherwise.
3. Articles dealing with speech, press, assembly, petition, or expression more broadly.
4. Generally not articles purely focused on the Free Exercise Clause or Establishment Clause, except if they also substantially discuss religious speech.
5. Articles about the First Amendment, state constitutional free speech provisions, federal and state statutes, common-law rules, and regulations protecting or restricting speech, or private organizations' speech regulations.
6. Articles about U.S. law, foreign law, comparative law, or international law.
7. Both big, ambitious work and narrower material.
8. Articles that are useful to the academy, to the bench, or to the bar (or if possible, to all three).
9. Articles arguing for broader speech protection, narrower speech protection, or anything else.

Comments

[Dr. Ed 2]

Who is eligible to submit? Or is it Einstein style -- on the merit of the paper and you don't care if the author is a patent clerk (which he was at the time).

[ducksalad]

(a) It asks for the drafts to be anonymized
(b) The regular submission section of each issue (as opposed to papers republishing a symposium) say "blind reviewed" which implies that the reviewer evaluates before knowing who wrote it.
(c) EV makes a point of saying that they are willing to publish students and people who have never held an academic appointment.
(d) Looking at the last few issues, there were many authors who were non-academic lawyers, and a few who were not lawyers at all, e.g. one computer scientist.
(e) I'm not foolish enough to think I could write a law review article but out of curiosity I went into their submission portal, and was able to create an account and get access to submit a draft.

So go for it, Dr. Ed!. If and when you are rejected will be for the content rather than who you are.