Board of Editors

Executive Editors

Articles that say something we don’t already know.
Articles with all sorts of approaches: doctrinal, theoretical, historical, empirical, or otherwise.
Articles dealing with speech, press, assembly, petition, or expression more broadly.
Generally not articles purely focused on the Free Exercise Clause or Establishment Clause, except if they also substantially discuss religious speech.
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.
Articles about U.S. law, foreign law, comparative law, or international law.
Both big, ambitious work and narrower material.
Articles that are useful to the academy, to the bench, or to the bar (or if possible, to all three).
Articles arguing for broader speech protection, narrower speech protection, or anything else.

You can submit to the journal via Scholastica, at https://freespeechlaw.scholasticahq.com/.
As with many other faculty-edited journals, we require exclusive submission. Any article you submit to us must not be under consideration elsewhere.
In exchange, we expect to give you an answer within two weeks.
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 will give you whatever editing feedback we came up with as we were reviewing your article. We will generally not offer line editing.
We will assign a starting page number, which you can use for future citations even before it is published, and we will be prepared to immediately publish the article online and on Westlaw and likely Lexis, once the article is suitably revised and polished. (We will publish in print every several months, as enough articles are finished to form an issue.)
We will defer to your authorial judgment on editing questions, except when we think accuracy or attention to counterarguments requires changes (in which case we will of course not make any changes without your approval).
We expect authors who are professors at American law schools to have cite-checking and proofreading done by their own research assistants. If that is a hardship for you, please let us know.
We will have the article proofread near the end of the publishing process, just to catch any remaining glitches.