The Submissions Process

Submissions are now open for Volume 35 Issue 1 of the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities. Authors may submit their work via email (yjlh@yale.edu) or Scholastica. Submissions should have a clear connection to both law and the humanities, broadly defined. Submissions will be reviewed over the summer.

At this time, we are no longer accepting expedite requests.

Authors should submit their work in a Microsoft Word document with double-spaced text directly on Scholastica, or at yjlh@yale.edu. Given that our general review procedure is blind, authors should remove any identifying information from the submission. The submission should also have a clear connection to both law and the humanities, broadly defined.

We confirm receipt of submissions and contact authors regarding final decisions by email. We aim to give each author a final decision within 6-8 weeks from the initial review period (though this period may be longer for authors submitting during the summer, around the winter holiday period, or depending on the volume of submissions). All submissions are reviewed by a Submissions Editor or an Editor-in-Chief.

The Journal does not publish law student Notes. However, students from any law school may submit their work for potential publication as standard Articles. Student work will be reviewed alongside all other submissions and with the same procedures, including rolling submissions and blind evaluations.

Please send any submissions questions to: yjlh@yale.edu.

A Note on Submission Length

In addition to reading the guidelines above, please take a moment to review our position on submission length before sending us your work:

YJLH cares more about the quality of submissions than their length, and the Journal recognizes that the appropriate length for a submission will vary depending on the submission’s topic and the complexity of its argument. Therefore, we do not have any rigid word count cutoffs. However, we strongly encourage authors to convey their arguments as concisely as possible, since law review submissions are often excessively long.

As such, all other things being equal, the Journal would prefer submissions roughly in the 12,000 to 15,000 word range, including footnotes. This length range represents scholarship that would likely be substantial enough for to be considered an Article while still short enough to be digestible. However, this range is merely a guideline. If an author can make a compelling, interesting, and substantial argument in even fewer words, we would view that concision as a positive.

Of course, submissions may need to be longer than this range to effectively convey their arguments. If a submission does need to be longer, we believe most authors can convey their arguments effectively in 25,000 words or fewer, again including footnotes. While straying over this 25,000-word mark would not automatically disqualify a submission, we would view a length above 25,000 words as a negative unless we could clearly see why the submission needs to be so long.