Publication Opportunities for Law Students

This article provides a concise overview of issues law students should consider when pursuing publication outside of a law review at the law school where they are enrolled. The article includes a table in Appendix A that is regularly updated noting the policies of 194 law reviews, including whether the law review allows external student authors to publish.

This regularly updated working paper provides a table of the online companions of main law reviews at the top 60 schools, including information about limitations and submission requirements.

This blog entry, by the author of Academic Legal Writing, offers a concise overview of how to effectively draft an abstract for your law review article, which may be required by law reviews.

This tongue-in-cheek article provides a Q&A style of various considerations regarding the publication process including the ideal time to submit a piece for consideration and related issues.

Scholastica is a platform through which authors can submit there articles for publication to hundreds of law reviews. The manuscript submission portal also provides access to relevant law review guidelines. Creation of an account is free, but article submissions are $6.60 per submission.

In an effort to support law student scholarship, the OU Law Library has adopted the following policy:

“Law students may submit law journal articles to Scholastica under and funded by the College of Law’s institutional account under these conditions:

o The article must have been written as part of (1) a course requirement, (2) the graduation writing requirement, or (3) as a requirement of law journal service during a student’s enrollment at the College of Law.

o The article must be reviewed by a faculty member who is either the (1) professor of record for a course requirement, (2) the advisor or supervisor of a graduation writing requirement, or (3) an expert in the relevant field of law. The faculty member must approve the submission of the article for publication and submission to Scholastica.

Students who meet these conditions may use the College of Law’s institutional Scholastica account to submit up to two unique and distinct articles per academic year for publication to a maximum of 25 law journals per article. Students may submit their article to additional journals but at the expense of the student.”

For questions about funding through the College of Law's Institutional account, please contact Elaine Bradshaw (ebradshaw@ou.edu).

This database provides a list of 111 online companions to major U.S. law reviews. The table lists whether student work is accepted, the preferred submission method, and other relevant information.

This database provides rankings (largely based on cite counts on Westlaw) for law reviews and journals. Use the Subjects filter to identify law reviews relevant to particular areas of law. Also useful as a tool for linking you to the website for each law review listed.

This HeinOnline database contains a list of bar journals by state. Note, HeinOnline includes historical coverage of bar journals that have discontinued publication, so further research may be required.

This website contains information about the different kinds of submissions authors can make and the requirements for such submissions to the Oklahoma Bar Journal.

This website contains a list of various ABA writing competitions which generally include awards for winners including cash prizes, comped conference trips, and potential selection for publication.

This databank lists over 800 scholarship and writing competition opportunities. You can filter these opportunities by Application Deadline Month to quickly identify relevant results.

This website provides an extensive list of upcoming symposia which can be cross-referenced with the above list of law reviews that accept student-authored pieces to identify potential symposia issues of interest for purposes of publication.