We’ll respond within fourteen days, and if you prefer, accepted pieces can be placed in publication within a few months.
The peer‑reviewed Journal of Free Speech Law, now in its fifth year, has published more than 150 articles. Contributors include Jack Balkin (Yale), Mark Lemley (Stanford), Jane Ginsburg (Columbia), Philip Hamburger (Columbia), Christopher Yoo (Penn), Stuart Benjamin (Duke), Andrew Koppelman (Northwestern), and numerous other leading scholars as well as bright rising talents, including some who do not hold tenure‑track academic appointments. (This roster does not cover our reprints of symposia, which have featured many additional top scholars, such as Robert Post, Mark Tushnet, Geoffrey Stone, Lee Bollinger, Jeremy Waldron, Danielle Citron, Genevieve Lakier, and more.)
The published articles have already been cited in 11 court decisions, in more than 2,000 scholarly works (per Google Scholar), and in at least 100 briefs. It’s worth noting that every article has had five years or fewer to accumulate these citations.
I expect that many authors will plan to submit free‑speech pieces to the usual law reviews when the submission cycle resumes in August. If you choose to submit exclusively to us before that, you will receive a decision within 14 days; and if you’d like quicker publication, we can publish within a few months, provided the piece is sufficiently clean and thoroughly cite‑checked by your research assistant. In other words, if your article is accepted here, it could be in print almost a year (or more) earlier than it would be in the traditional law journals.
Of course, please share this with colleagues or friends who might be interested. Note that submissions do not compete for a fixed number of slots in an issue or volume; we publish works that meet our quality standards whenever they come in.
All submissions must be exclusive to us, but, again, you’ll receive a decision within 14 days, so you can pursue other outlets if we decline. Please upload an anonymized draft at https://freespeechlaw.scholasticahq.com/. A few guidelines:
- Rather than a cover letter, provide a brief statement (one page maximum, ideally only a paragraph or two) outlining what makes your article novel. If there is a specific way to establish novelty (for instance, it’s the first piece to analyze how case X interacts with doctrine Y), please indicate it.
- Submit manuscripts single‑spaced, using a proportionally spaced font.
- Ensure the Introduction quickly and clearly presents the core claims you are making.
- Avoid lengthy background sections recounting familiar Supreme Court precedents or other well‑known matters. We prefer work that dives straight into the novel material, explaining the necessary legal principles as they arise if needed.
- Each article should be as concise as possible, while still thorough where required.
- As with everyone else, we value writing that is simple, clear, and engaging.
- Student‑authored pieces are welcome, and we apply the same standards to them as to pieces by others.
We publish:
- Articles that convey something new or previously unknown.
- Writings employing a variety of approaches—doctrinal, theoretical, historical, empirical, or other.
- Works addressing speech, press, assembly, petition, or expression in a broad sense.
- Generally not pieces focused solely on the Free Exercise Clause or the Establishment Clause, unless 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 about private organizations’ speech regulations.
- Pieces on U.S. law, foreign law, comparative law, or international law.
- Both large, ambitious projects and more narrowly scoped works.
- Articles that serve the academy, the bench, or the bar (or, ideally, all three).
- Pieces arguing for broader speech protection, narrower protection, or any other position.
