Article Selection Process
When we receive your article, we will notify you by postcard or email that we have received your article. The review process typically takes five to ten days. If you receive one or more offers from another journal, please email the Article Review Board Chair with the name of the other journal and its deadline for your response, and requesting expedited review of your article. Expedited review does not provide any greater likelihood that your article will be accepted - it only speeds up the review process. Email is the best way to reach us; the phone is not.
Text and citations should generally conform to The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (17th ed. 2000), copyright by the Columbia Law Review Association, the Harvard Law Review Association, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal. We encourage authors from disciplines other than law, or from other countries, to familiarize themselves with this system of citation. Submissions that do not approximately conform to Bluebook citation are disfavored.
We accept submissions year round. However, we publish twice per year, and usually finalize our selections for the January issue by mid to late August, and for the June issue by early January. The review process is slower during the summer, but will be significantly expedited if you submit electronically, rather than on paper.
The typical length for an Article is 60-90 double-spaced pages. We do occasionally accept Articles that are significantly longer, but the chances of acceptance for a longer piece are reduced because of constraints on the total length of each issue. We rarely accept Articles shorter than 50 double-spaced pages.
The typical length for a student Note is 40-60 double-spaced pages. We rarely, if ever, accept Notes shorter than 30 double-spaced pages. We may accept a Note that is significantly longer than 60 double-spaced pages, but would expect such a piece to be of higher scholarly quality than the typical Note. We encourage submissions from students outside of Stanford. Note writers may wish to consult Writing a Student Article by Eugene Volokh.
The interdisciplinary and international nature of environmental law and policy research often means that authors will need to cite scientific, foreign, or other sources outside of traditional legal materials. We welcome such submissions, but an unusually large number of such sources may make the article unmanageable given our editing resources. In the cover letter, mention that you have all of them ready to go in a manila envelope if your piece is accepted. This will reduce the Journal s anxiety over the scope of source-gathering, and may improve your submission s likelihood of acceptance.
We accept and encourage papers on a wide variety of topics, not just in traditional environmental or natural resources law, but also environmental policy, law and economics, international environmental law, animal rights, toxic torts, environmental ethics, and other topics relating to law and the environment. However, if your submission is at the edge of our core topic areas (for instance, a paper on tax implications of various methods of accounting, and how they affect developers investment in brownfields), please ensure that it is comprehensible to readers not versed in a specialty discipline.
We only accept book reviews from Stanford Law School students or recent graduates. On rare occasions, a short paper responds to a book, and because of its length, depth of reasoning and research, and general scholarly quality, we will consider it as a Comment or Essay, but this is the exception.
Please only submit final, reviewable copy. We view with disfavor a submission accompanied by a cover letter in which the author promises to update the research if the paper is accepted.
How we classify submissions
A paper submitted by a current student must be considered as a Note. We evaluate Note submissions from students at schools other than Stanford on the same basis as Note submissions from Stanford students.
A paper submitted by an author who has graduated within the past year must be evaluated as a Note if it was primarily written while the author was still a student; if it was primarily written after the completion of the author's studies, it may be considered a Note, at the author's option. (Sometimes we will offer to publish a paper as a Note but not as an Article, so it can be to the author s advantage to categorize a submission as a Note, to increase the chance of acceptance.)
A paper submitted by an author who is more than one year out of school must be evaluated as an Article, regardless of when the paper was written.
On rare occasions, we will consider a submission as a Comment or Essay. These tend to paint with a broader brush, tend to have less particularized or quantified support, tend to be shorter, and tend to be more lightly footnoted.