OUR SUBMISSIONS REVIEW PROCESS

The Stanford Law Review takes pride in carefully and fairly reviewing every submission that we receive. Our Articles Committee is responsible for selecting every Article or Essay that we publish. We have multiple stages of review, but every piece that we accept is reviewed by the entire committee.

AI Policy

In accordance with our AI Policy, we require that authors disclose any use of generative AI that has significantly affected the substance, originality, or reliability of the submission. Regardless of whether you used generative AI in the creation of your piece, please fill out the following form.

Anonymous Review

It is our policy to apply the same standards of review to all submissions and to judge pieces based solely on their content. To that end, our review process is fully anonymized until the Committee’s final vote. All voting reviewers of the Articles Committee complete their reads without knowledge of the author’s identity, institutional affiliation, or any other biographical information. Only the Senior Articles Editor knows the identity of the author; they handle all communication with the author. The Senior Articles Editor is not a voting member on the Articles Committee.

Exploding Offers

On April 19, 2011, the Stanford 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 adopt this policy.

Exclusive Submissions

If your preference is to publish in the Stanford Law Review, we strongly recommend that you submit your manuscript to us exclusively, at least ten days before submitting it to other journals. Because we undertake a very thorough review of all submissions, we are typically unable to make quick acceptances when faced with exploding offers from other journals. Additionally, please message us through Scholastica to inform us that your submission is exclusive.

Demographic Information

Providing demographic information is optional. The information may be used in aggregated statistics. No identifying information, including any demographic information, will be made available to Articles Committee reviewers as they make selections. Your decision to abstain from providing this information will not adversely affect your submission during our review process.

The Stanford Law Review will not disclose personally identifiable information outside of the Law Review.

For more information on Scholastica’s data access and usage, please visit their Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, and Data Processing Addendum.

MANUSCRIPT REQUIREMENTS

Anonymization

In order to preserve Stanford Law Review’s anonymous review process, manuscript files must be anonymized, that is, stripped of names and identifying information. We will not accept manuscripts that do not comport with this requirement.

Style

The text and citations of the submission should conform to The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (22nd ed. 2025), compiled by the editors of the Columbia Law Review, the Harvard Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and The Yale Law Journal.

Article Length

The Stanford Law Review has a word limit of 30,000 words (including footnotes), and a preference for 20,000 words or fewer. We value brevity and look favorably on pieces below the 30,000-word ceiling. The Stanford Law Review is among the fifteen leading law reviews that have signed this joint statement.

Ethics Policy

In the past few decades, legal scholarship has increased in sophistication, depth, scale, and volume. While The Bluebook rigorously governs methods of citation, law reviews have generally lagged in adopting similar standards for author conduct. Therefore, Stanford Law Review has adopted the following conditions for accepting an Article or Essay:

(I) Originality: Articles must be the original work of the author or authors identified on the submission, except for material in the public domain or material from other works that are properly cited or included with the permission of the rights owners. The article, in whole or in part, must not have been published before.

(II) Replicability: At a minimum, empirical works must document and archive all datasets so that third parties may replicate the published findings. These datasets will be published on our website. The Law Review will make narrow exceptions on a case-by-case basis, particularly if the datasets involve issues of confidentiality and/or privacy.

(III) Peer Review: Peer review not only enhances an article’s quality, but guarantees originality. It is our practice to subject submissions to peer review, albeit in a form amenable to the typical law review selection timeframes.

(IV) Conflicts of Interest: Authors must disclose any conflicts of interest. This includes any financial interest that may be affected by the results or conclusions in the submission. This also includes any source of outside funding for the submission that may have affected or biased the assumptions, results, or conclusions in the submission–for example, any payment received by an outside organization to complete the work. If the funding helped pay for the expenses associated with a project (travel, data compilation, simulations, etc.), we simply ask that the connection be noted and the organization thanked. We do not, however, publish pieces for which the author was paid taxable income by an organization other than the relevant employer–that is, income from an outside organization or corporation that merely benefited the author, rather than funded the expenses of a project.

FINANCIAL HARDSHIP

We recognize that the fee associated with submitting manuscripts through Scholastica may cause financial hardship for some authors. As part of their commitment to ensuring broad access to legal publishing, Scholastica is willing to consider requests for fee waivers and other accommodations. Please direct fee waiver requests to support@scholasticahq.com.

If Scholastica is unable to accommodate your circumstances, please email your submission to William Frankel, Senior Articles Editor for Volume 79, at articles@stanfordlawreview.org. Please ensure that you attach an anonymized version of your article in your email in accordance with the instructions above under “Anonymization,” and that you include your name and institutional affiliation in the body of your email.

OTHER ISSUES

Please address any additional questions about the submissions process to William Frankel, Senior Articles Editor for Volume 79, at articles@stanfordlawreview.org.