The Harvard Law Review and Harvard Law Review Forum welcome submissions of Articles, Essays, and proposals for Book Reviews through our electronic submission system.
About HLS
Harvard Law School (HLS) is the law school of Harvard University, a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest continuously operating law school in the United States.
About HLR
Harvard Law Review (HLR) is a student-run organization whose primary purpose is to publish a journal of legal scholarship. The Review comes out monthly from November through June and has roughly 2,500 pages per volume.
The organization is formally independent of the Harvard Law School. Student editors make all editorial and organizational decisions and, together with a professional business staff of three, carry out day-to-day operations.
Submission Categories
We strongly prefer submissions that comply with the following length limits (including all text, footnotes, and appendices):
- Articles (Print): 25,000 words*
- Book Reviews (Print): proposals need not be more than a few pages.
- Essays (Print/Forum): 12,000-17,500 words.
- Responses (Forum): 8,000 words (typically solicited but proposals welcome).
- Commentaries (Forum): 6,000 words (typically solicited but proposals welcome).
*Length exceeding 30,000 words will weigh against selection, and we rarely unconditionally accept submissions over 37,500 words.
For background regarding the Review’s length policy, please see a joint letter issued by a number of law journals across the country.
How to Submit?
We encourage contributors to submit manuscripts as Microsoft Word documents through our electronic submission system. Alternatively, manuscripts can be mailed to: Articles Office, Harvard Law Review, 1511 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138.
To submit a piece for publication in the Forum, please select “Forum (online)” in the “Article Type” dropdown menu on the submissions form.
Anonymization
Please help facilitate our anonymous review process by:
- Confining your name, affiliation, biographical information, and acknowledgements to a separate cover page
- Including the manuscript’s title on the first text page.
- Removing any self-citations by replacing phrases such as “I have previously written that . . .” with anonymized replacements such as “It has previously been written that . . .”
Citations
Please use footnotes that conform to the 21st edition of the Bluebook.
Expedited Review
If you would like to request an expedited review of your submission, please use the unique link included in your confirmation email (these sometimes end up in spam folders).
