Academic Legal Writing - Eugene Volokh [134]
b. Faculty-edited specialty journals: Most specialty journals are student-edited, but some are faculty-edited, and many faculty-edited journals insist that you not submit to anyone else while they're considering your work; call them to check whether they indeed have this policy. You should generally avoid journals that forbid simultaneous submissions, since they might not get back to you for months, and during those months you won't be able to send the article anywhere else.
On the other hand, sometimes you might have the time to wait (for instance, if you finish the article in December, when many student journals aren't accepting submissions). Then you should submit to faculty-edited journals, which are often quite prestigious—but politely ask them how quickly they'll give you an answer.
7. Finding the best generalist journals: Look up the latest U.S. News & World Report rankings of law schools; this list is not a great indicator of schools' quality, but it does give a good sense of their reputations, which is what matters to you here. You'll want to send the article to the general journals at all the schools ranked 60 to 21, or possibly 100 to 21.
If you are a recent graduate, you should also submit to general journals at the top 20 schools. If you're a current student, you might do the same (especially if someone else is paying for the submission), but your odds with those journals as a current student are quite low.
This whole process may sound unpleasantly class-conscious, but there's a pecking order out there, and ignoring it is costly, for two reasons. First, the higher-ranked the journal, the better the publication will look in your resume, precisely because the higher-ranked journals tend to be more selective.
Second, consider the likely thinking of potential readers (law professors, lawyers, students, judges, or clerks) who do a Westlaw or Lexis search, and find fifty articles, all with relevant-sounding titles and written by people whom they don't know. How will they choose which articles to read? In large part by the prestige of the journal in which they're published. They'll realize that this is an imperfect way of selecting articles, but it's the only way they can afford to use, since they probably won't have the time to read or even skim each one.
There are other journal ranking systems out there—for instance, ones based on how often articles in the journal have been cited—and you might prefer to use them instead. But my sense is that the U.S. News rankings best reflect (and shape) schools' reputations, and journals' reputations generally track their schools' reputations.
8. Formatting: Format your article to look like an already published article: use a proportionally spaced font, nicely formatted footnotes, single spacing, running page heads, a justified right margin, hyphenation, and so on. This makes your work more readable and more professional-looking. (I've put a sample document template on the Web at http://volokh.com/writing.) Some journals claim that they want submissions in other formats—for instance, double-spaced—but I've never gotten any complaints about my method, and I suspect that most editors actually find it easier to read articles formatted the way I describe.
9. Submitting: There are three ways to submit your article.
a. ExpressO: Berkeley Electronic Press's ExpressO service lets you automatically submit your article to nearly all the journals you want. (A few journals don't accept ExpressO submissions, but very few.) I link to it at http://volokh.com/writing/submitting.
ExpressO asks you to indicate the journals to which you want to send the article, and prompts you for the names of the files that contain your article and cover letter. It then picks up the documents from your computer, prints and sends them to the few journals that insist on print copies, and e-mails them to the many journals that take electronic submissions. This can save you a lot of