Submissions

The Submissions Process

Submissions for the Fall 2026 are now open. The submissions portal will close on September 15. The Journal will not accept emailed submissions. Any submissions via email will not be considered. If you need to request an exception to this rule due to dire financial circumstances, please email yjlh@yale.edu with an explanation.

To submit your work, please submit a Word document or PDF file of your article via Scholastica.

Submissions should have a clear connection to both law and the humanities, broadly defined (see below). We have previously published scholarship in the intersection of law and philosophy, literature, history, religion, and the visual arts, as well as work in legal theory. We encourage authors to consult recent issues to get a sense of the breadth of scholarship welcomed by the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities. In order to ensure that publication opportunities are accessible to scholars whether their background is rooted in law or in the humanities, either Bluebook OR Chicago Style citations are permissible. If using Chicago style, please use footnotes (no bibliography necessary)—and standard in-line citations of caselaw is welcomed.

The Journal values blind review—each piece will be anonymized and considered without regard to academic position or institutional affiliation. Every submission is read by an Editor-in-Chief and a team of editors. The Journal does have a policy of issuing desk rejections with the approval of two readers. Due to the volume of submissions we receive, we cannot individually respond to authors whose pieces are not accepted.

Please send any submissions questions to: yjlh@yale.edu.

A Note on Submission Length

In addition to reading the guidelines above, please take a moment to review our position on submission length before sending us your work.

YJLH cares more about the quality of submissions than their length, and the Journal recognizes that the appropriate length for a submission will vary depending on the submission's topic and the complexity of its argument. Therefore, we do not have any rigid word count cutoffs. However, we strongly encourage authors to convey their arguments as concisely as possible, since law review submissions are often excessively long.

As such, all other things being equal, the Journal would prefer submissions roughly in the 12,000 to 15,000 word range, including footnotes. This length range represents scholarship that would likely be substantial enough to be considered an Article while still short enough to be digestible. However, this range is merely a guideline. If an author can make a compelling, interesting, and substantial argument in even fewer words, we would view that concision as a positive.

Of course, submissions may need to be longer than this range to effectively convey their arguments. If a submission does need to be longer, we believe most authors can convey their arguments effectively in 25,000 words or fewer, again including footnotes. While straying over this 25,000-word mark would not automatically disqualify a submission, we would view a length above 25,000 words as a negative unless we could clearly see why the submission needs to be so long.

Academic Integrity Policy

The Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities adheres to the highest standards of academic integrity as embodied in the disciplinary norms of the humanities. We use the definition of plagiarism articulated by the American Historical Association in their Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct, which is linked below. The Journal will rescind or retract any articles with substantial academic integrity concerns and reserves the right to take additional action as is appropriate.

Authors should be aware that using AI-based tools to help generate the content of an article, including but not limited to large language models (LLMs), generative AI, and chatbots like ChatGPT, violates our notion of authorship. Authors must acknowledge and document any usage of such tools. The final decision about whether such usage is permissible lies with the Journal’s editorial team.

https://www.historians.org/jobs-and-professional-development/statements-standards-and-guidelines-of-the-discipline/statement-on-standards-of-professional-conduct#Plagiarism

A Note on Student Submissions

The Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities welcomes student scholarship. The Journal does not currently publish law student Notes on a separate track from Articles. However, students from any law school may submit their work for potential publication as standard Articles. Student work will be reviewed alongside all other submissions and with the same procedures, including rolling submissions and blind evaluations.

A Note on Submissions from Non-Legal Academics

The Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities welcomes submissions from scholars who are not legal professionals, academics, or students. Students and faculty in other disciplines are encouraged to submit work relating to law and the humanities. Our acceptance of Chicago Style citations (see above) facilitates this opportunity.

Subscriptions

The Yale Journal of Law & Humanities is currently not accepting subscribers. All of our issues will be published on our digital commons portal with open access. To view our current and previous issues, please click here.

A Note on the Humanities, Broadly Defined

The Journal is open to publishing material that stretches the bounds of legal scholarship. As interested scholars may feel uncomfortable with the traditional domain of law reviews—case law, statutes, and the like—we encourage anyone considering whether their paper fits under our broad tent to consult some of the following articles as examples of scholarship we have published that strays further afield from standard law review material.

Drucilla Cornell, "Time, Deconstruction, and the Challenge to Legal Positivism: The Call for Judicial Responsibility"

Fred Dallmayr, "Self and Other: Gadamer and the Hermeneutics of Difference"

Umberto Eco, "The University and Mass Media"

Paul Fry, "Matters of Interpretation"

Anthony Kronman, "The Erotic Politician"

Gayatri Spivak, "Constitutions and Culture Studies"

Georgia Warnke and Kent Greenawalt debating hermeneutics