Journal of Free Speech Law: Publish Your Article in 2½ Months

I’d like to again solicit submissions to our peer-reviewed Journal of Free Speech Law, and mention one of our great advantages: We can publish quickly (by the standards of academic journals), if that’s what you’d like.

Our most recent article, for instance, was submitted to us April 8. We require submissions that are exclusive to us, but we promise an answer within 14 days; in this instance, we accepted it on April 16, and passed along the reviewer comments to the author. (We offer such comments whether the article is accepted or rejected, and I understand they can be helpful to authors regardless of our decision.)

We ask our authors to have the articles cite-checked by their own research assistants (though if the author doesn’t have access to an RA, we are generally able to help with that), and we give authors time to polish up the article some more, if they’d like. Here, the author took a bit over a month to do that—no problem from our perspective—and gave us a revised draft May 22. We then got the author an edit from one of our Executive Editors; the author got the edit back to us; we got the author a proofread from our proofreader; the author got that back to us; and then we did a final proofread, which the author got back to us in turn.

On June 24, we published the article, basically 2½ months after we received it. (Some articles might take longer, for various reasons, but this was 40 pages, a roughly average-length article.) And we could have published it even earlier, if the author had wanted to, since more than a month of the time was on the author’s end. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with the author taking some time to polish up the piece—the point is simply that we are equipped to publish quickly, if the author wants.

To my knowledge, many top student-edited journals are shut down for the Summer, and won’t review manuscripts until August. That means the manuscripts probably wouldn’t be published until next May, or even later. But if you submit to us now, and want to publish quickly, you can have the article out this September, or possibly even earlier.

Some more details: The journal is now four years old, and has published over 100 articles, including by Jack Balkin (Yale), Mark Lemley (Stanford), Jane Ginsburg (Columbia), Philip Hamburger (Columbia), Christopher Yoo (Penn), and many others—both prominent figures in the field and emerging young scholars, including ones who didn’t have a tenure-track academic appointment. (This list doesn’t include our reprinting others’ symposia, which have also included many other top scholars, such as Robert Post, Mark Tushnet, Geoffrey Stone, Lee Bollinger, Jeremy Waldron, Danielle Citron, Genevieve Lakier, and more.) The articles have been cited so far in 11 court cases, over 325 articles, and at least 100 briefs. And note that all the articles have only had four years or less to attract these citations.

Please pass this along to friends or colleagues who you think might be interested. Note that the submissions don’t compete for a limited number of slots in an issue or volume; we’ll publish articles that satisfy our quality standards whenever we get them.

All submissions must be exclusive to us, but, again, you’ll have an answer within 14 days, so you’ll be able to submit elsewhere if we say no. Please submit an anonymized draft, together with at https://freespeechlaw.scholasticahq.com/. A few guidelines:

• Instead of a cover letter, please submit at most one page (and preferably just a paragraph or two) explaining how your article is novel. If there is a particular way of showing that (e.g., it’s the first article to discuss how case X and doctrine Y interact), please let us know.
• Please submit articles single-spaced, in a proportionally spaced font.
• Please make sure that the Introduction quickly and clearly explains the main claims you are making.
• Please avoid extended background sections reciting familiar Supreme Court precedents or other well-known matters. We prefer articles that get right down to the novel material (if necessary, quickly explaining the necessary legal principles as they go).
• Each article should be as short as possible, and as long as necessary.
• Like everyone else, we like simple, clear, engaging writing.
• We are open to student-written work, and we evaluate it under the same standards applicable to work written by others.

We publish:

1. Articles that say something we don’t already know.
2. Articles with all sorts of approaches: doctrinal, theoretical, historical, empirical, or otherwise.
3. Articles dealing with speech, press, assembly, petition, or expression more broadly.
4. Generally not articles purely focused on the Free Exercise Clause or Establishment Clause, except if they also substantially discuss religious speech.
5. Articles about the First Amendment, state constitutional free speech provisions, federal and state statutes, common-law rules, and regulations protecting or restricting speech, or private organizations’ speech regulations.
6. Articles about U.S. law, foreign law, comparative law, or international law.
7. Both big, ambitious work and narrower material.
8. Articles that are useful to the academy, to the bench, or to the bar (or if possible, to all three).
9. Articles arguing for broader speech protection, narrower speech protection, or anything else.

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