Print & Forum Submissions
The Harvard Law Review and Harvard Law Review Forum welcome submissions of Articles, Essays, and proposals for Book Reviews through our electronic submission system.
Length
We strongly prefer submissions that comply with the following length limits (including all text, footnotes, and appendices):
- Articles (Print): 25,000 words*
- Book Reviews (Print): proposals need not be more than a few pages.
- Essays (Print/Forum): 12,000-17,500 words.
- Responses (Forum): 8,000 words (typically solicited but proposals welcome).
- Commentaries (Forum): 6,000 words (typically solicited but proposals welcome).
*Length exceeding 30,000 words will weigh against selection, and we rarely unconditionally accept submissions over 37,500 words.
For background regarding the Review’s length policy, please see a joint letter issued by a number of law journals across the country.
Electronic Submission
We encourage contributors to submit manuscripts as Microsoft Word documents through our electronic submission system. Alternatively, manuscripts can be mailed to: Articles Office, Harvard Law Review, 1511 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138.
To submit a piece for publication in the Forum, please select “Forum (online)” in the “Article Type” dropdown menu on the submissions form.
Anonymization
Please help facilitate our anonymous review process by:
- Confining your name, affiliation, biographical information, and acknowledgments to a separate cover page
- Including the manuscript’s title on the first text page.
- Removing any self-citations by replacing phrases such as “I have previously written that . . .” with anonymized replacements such as “It has previously been written that . . .”
Citations
Please use footnotes that conform to the 21st edition of the Bluebook.
Expedited Review
If you would like to request an expedited review of your submission, please use the unique link included in your confirmation email (these sometimes end up in spam folders).
Blog Submissions
The Blog aims to publish content from a variety of points of view, and uses a more abbreviated editing process than our print and Forum content. If you are a scholar or practitioner interested in publishing on the Blog, please contact us via email at [email protected] and include either a full draft or a description of your potential post. Blog posts are typically between 750 and 1500 words, although there is no strictly enforced maximum. Posts also use hyperlinks instead of footnotes. The Blog does not accept submissions from current law students.
Submission Notes
Seven-Day Offer Window
The Harvard Law Review and several peer journals have committed to give every author at least seven days to decide whether to accept any offer of publication. The Review believes that eliminating “exploding offers” will improve the quality of our deliberations and the scholarship that we publish.
Preference for Exclusivity
We recommend that you consider submitting your manuscript to us exclusively. Our review process is lengthy; we conduct faculty reviews and a vote of our entire editorial board before we accept pieces. As a result, we are often unable to make quick decisions when faced with exploding offers from other journals. If your preference is to publish in the Review, consider submitting the manuscript to us exclusively at least two weeks before submitting it to other journals.
Authors who choose to submit exclusively should indicate in our electronic submission system the date they expect to send the manuscript to other journals. We apply the same standards of review to all submissions, but submitting exclusively makes it more likely that we will have time to put the manuscript through all the stages of our review process.
Review Process & Timing
The Harvard Law Review carefully considers all manuscripts that it receives. Our selection process has many steps: each piece is reviewed anonymously, at least three editors review every submission, and many pieces go through substantially more stages of review, including an Articles Committee vote, preemption check, faculty peer review, and full-body vote. Although we make every effort to honor requests for expedited review, we do not omit any of our review stages in response to such requests. When requesting an expedited review, please understand that our selection process takes time.
There is no best time to submit a manuscript to the Review. We will never reject an article for lack of space; rather, we will hold it over for consideration by the next volume. We notify authors of our decisions by email and we do not discuss the reasons for our publication decisions.
Source Attribution Policy
The Review aims to ensure that any ideas that already exist in the literature are properly referenced. We do not permit authors to repurpose sentences or paragraphs published elsewhere without quotation marks or citations. As part of our editorial process, we require quotation marks whenever a non-trivial amount of exact language has appeared in another source and citations whenever an idea has been paraphrased from another source — even if the source is the author’s prior work. The Review’s editors work with authors we publish to help them meet our self-citation requirements.