Timeline
The Stanford Environmental Law Journal accepts submissions year round. However, we publish two times per year, and usually finalize our selections for the January issue by mid to late August and for the June issue by mid February. The review process is generally slower during the summer.
Upon submitting your article to the Journal, an Article Review Board Chair will notify you by email that we have received your article. The review process typically takes two to three weeks. If you receive one or more offers from another journal and would like an expedited review of your article, please email the Article Review Board Chair with the name of the other journal and its deadline for your response. Expedited review does not provide any greater likelihood that your article will be accepted – it only speeds up the review process.
Length and Format
The typical length for an Article is fifty to ninety double-spaced pages. The typical length for a student Note is thirty to sixty double-spaced pages. We rarely accept Note submissions outside of these ranges, but may, on rare occasion, be willing to consider student Comments or Essays of shorter length that present an exceptional depth of reasoning and scholarship. Please also note that we encourage students from all law schools to submit their work, but we only accept book reviews from Stanford Law School students or recent graduates.
Text and citations should conform to The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation(19th ed. 2013). We encourage authors from disciplines other than law, or from other countries, to familiarize themselves with this system of citation.
Please only submit final copy based on up-to-date research. We do not accept submissions by post.
Content
We accept and encourage papers on a wide variety of topics, not just in traditional environmental or natural resources law, but also climate change and environmental policy, law and economics, international environmental law, animal rights, toxic torts, environmental ethics, and other topics relating to law and the environment. If your submission is at the edge of our core topic areas, please ensure that it is comprehensible to readers not versed in the discipline.
How we classify submissions
A paper submitted by a current student will be considered as a Note. We evaluate Note submissions from students at schools other than Stanford on the same basis as Note submissions from Stanford students.
A paper submitted by an author who has graduated within the past year will be evaluated as a Note if it was primarily written while the author was still a student. A paper submitted by an author who is more than one year out of school will be evaluated as an Article, regardless of when the paper was written.
On rare occasions, we will consider a student submission as a Comment or Essay. These tend to paint with a broader brush, tend to have less particularized or quantified support, tend to be shorter, and tend to be more lightly footnoted.