How to Submit
The Harvard Law Review and Harvard Law Review Forum welcome submissions of Articles, Essays (shorter pieces that advance an idea, summarize a development, or initiate a conversation), and proposals for Book Reviews through our electronic submission system. The Harvard Law Review Blog accepts submissions via email.
We request that contributors comply with the following standards:
Electronic Submission
We strongly encourage contributors to submit manuscripts as Microsoft Word documents through our electronic submission system. Alternatively, print manuscripts can be mailed to: Articles Office, Harvard Law Review, Gannett House, 1511 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138. We do not accept email submissions.
Length
Articles: under 25,000 words is strongly preferred (including text, footnotes, and appendices). Length exceeding 30,000 words will weigh against selection, and we rarely unconditionally accept submissions over 37,500 words.
Essays: 12,000-17,500 words.
Forum: see guidance here.
For background regarding the Review’s length policy, please see a joint letter issued by a number of law journals across the country.
Anonymization
To facilitate our anonymous review process, please confine your name, affiliation, biographical information, and acknowledgments to a separate cover page. Please include the manuscript’s title on the first text page. If your piece includes self-citations, please consider removing from the anonymized version phrases such as “I have previously written that,” and substituting in 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. If you did not receive this email, be sure to check your Spam / Junk folder.
Notes
Seven-Day Offer Window
On April 19, 2011, the Harvard Law Review and several peer journals released a joint letter committing to give every author at least seven days to decide whether to accept any offer of publication. Eliminating exploding offers will improve the quality of our deliberations and the scholarship that we publish, and we invite all other student-edited law journals to join this letter.
Preference for Exclusivity
We strongly recommend that you submit your manuscript to us exclusively. As described below, our review process is lengthy; unlike many journals, we conduct faculty reviews and a vote of our entire staff before we accept pieces. As a result, we are often unable to make quick decisions when faced with exploding offers from other journals. Accordingly, if your preference is to publish your manuscript in the Review, please consider submitting the manuscript to the Review exclusively at least two weeks before submitting it to other journals.
Authors who choose to give us an exclusive submission should indicate in our electronic submission system the date that 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
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.
Book Reviews
While most of our book reviews are solicited, we welcome proposals through our electronic system and via email at [email protected]. Proposals need not run longer than a few pages. Please bear in mind that we strongly prefer to publish reviews within one year of a title’s publication date and that proposals accepted during the spring will be published no earlier than December.
Symposia
The Review is not accepting proposals for cosponsored symposia for our print publication at this time.
Source Attribution Policy
The Review aims to ensure that any ideas that already exist in the literature are properly referenced. To that end, 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.