As a student, getting published in your own law journal is not usually difficult, provided you do the work required. Even as a student, however, you should set your own standards high, because hiring faculty will read your student work as they evaluate your scholarly potential.
Getting published as a practitioner can be challenging and time consuming but is necessary if you are to be a successful candidate. The following suggestions may help.
Good Substance
Quality matters. No matter how much you publish prior to going on the market, if the work is not compelling, you will find it difficult to get hired. Make sure you have had numerous readers including at least a few faculty members comment on the paper prior to submitting of publication, and if the article is not ready for publication, don't publish it just to have it on your resume. You will have to live with the article as published. One of the biggest mistakes people make is publishing material for the sake of publication that ultimately detracts from the actual record at the time of applying for a teaching job. The point here is not to chill publication. It is to encourage you to make sure the article is ready. Also, there is a real limit to the value of “practitioner” materials on an academic market resume.
Submit Complete Articles
Make sure your article is complete (i.e. no missing footnotes or references to materials to be added later) and well blue-booked. Although this should not matter perhaps, it affects the way editors consider the paper. In part this is because it signals more work for them.
Consider Page Limits
In February 2005, Harvard Law Review announced that it believed law review articles had become excessively long and it would give preference for publication to articles under 25,000 words (50 law review pages) including text and footnotes. Related to this policy, Harvard Law Review will no longer publish pieces exceeding 35,000 words (70-75 pages) except in extraordinary circumstances. Following Harvard’s announcement, a number of other law schools joined the statement regarding the length of legal scholarship. Although each school has different restrictions on length (see a summary here), the Harvard guidelines are fairly common among journals. As you develop your scholarship, you should keep these page limits in mind.
Understand the Timing
The best time to submit an article is in the spring (March 1 to March 15 is considered the “sweet spot”) when new boards are beginning to review articles for the next year's volumes, or at the beginning of the academic year (late August and September), when the editorial boards are selecting articles for later volumes and filling extra pages. Submitting outside these well recognized windows diminishes your chances of being selected for publication. If you complete an article after September, however, you can submit it. If it is not accepted for publication, you can always submit again in spring.
Research Where to Submit
There are several ways to rank law journals. Many people rely on the law school rankings published by U.S. News and World Report. You might also want to look at Washington and Lee University School of Law's journal rankings that measures how frequently a journal has been cited. Do not forget to research specialty journals such as New York University School of Law's Journal of International Law and Politics.
Submit Your Article
Prepare a short cover letter with your contact information and an abstract of your article. It can be useful to state explicitly why your article is important. Unless you are an established author, you should do a preliminary submission to the top 100 journals. The Suffolk University Law School has created a handy list of law journals and submission information. To save time and money on a mailing, look at individual journal's electronic submission policies, or consider the e-submission systems available at Washington and Lee University School of Law or the fee-based ExpressO. For submission method information please see http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1019029.
Understand Expedited Reviews and Leveraging
After you have sent out your article, you will hopefully receive an offer of publication. In order to place your piece in the best journal possible, you must contact other journals and request an expedited review of your manuscript. What this means is that you call (or email) a journal requesting that that they speed up their decision on your manuscript because you have an outstanding offer from another journal. Your call (or email) is premised on the fact that you have a deadline from the first journal, and you would like the second school to read your piece and give you an answer before that deadline passes. Do not be shy about asking for expedited review - it is an expected part of the process. A page with details on expedited review is available in the left navigation box.
