Our editing process
If we offer to publish your piece, we will send you a contract by which you will transfer copyright to the Stanford Environmental Law Journal. If your piece cites materials that are more than typically difficult to find (unusual, unpublished, foreign, etc.), we will expect you to mail a copy of them to us at your own expense immediately upon your acceptance of our offer. A Lead Article Editor is assigned to each article and a team of Member and Associate Editors works with the LAE during each round to check all footnote citations for accuracy, format, clarity, etc.
Our editing process is done entirely electronically, via email, using the Track Changes (formerly known as Revision Marking) feature in Word.
Because we only publish two issues per year, we edit each article extensively. We are known to be particularly aggressive editors, and we look for authors who are looking forward to working closely with us to edit their work tightly. In the past, some authors accustomed to more laissez-faire editing have expected that once their submission was accepted, their work was largely done. Those authors have been surprised at the extent of work required to make a submission publishable in our journal, but in the end have been pleased by the improvements we reached together. There are three comprehensive rounds of editing. We send out our editing calendar in the first week of the process, and the deadlines are hard and fast.