Scholastica Law Review Submission Insights: 2025 Edition
A data-driven look at the legal scholarship cycle
Updated Jan 2025
Welcome to the latest edition of Scholastica's Law Review Submission Insights report — now in its 10th year! Here, we dig into our submission season data (anonymized and aggregated) to shed light on past and present trends in the annual article selection cycle.
Since launching this site, we've evolved and expanded it — including new stats for this year on law reviews' decision time frames and acceptance rates.
The below series of graphs highlight findings from the most recent submission cycle (January 1, 2024 - December 31, 2024).
For additional submission season resources, we encourage authors to visit Scholastica's Law Review Submissions Center and editors to visit the Law Editor Learning Center. Now, without further ado, let's get to it!
When do law reviews open?
We're kicking things off with one of the most common questions we hear at Scholastica, "When do law reviews usually open?" (and presumably initiate article selection). The graph below maps out, by day, when law reviews opened during the 2024 article selection cycle (January 1, 2024 - December 31, 2024).
As was the case in all previous Scholastica submission cycle data pulls, most law reviews began opening in late January and late July, and the days with the most law review openings were February 1st, followed by August 1st. Anecdotally, we've heard many editors refer to those dates as their markers for the beginning of the spring and fall submission seasons.
Around 56% of law reviews using Scholastica actively opened/closed submissions across the year in 2024. The other ~44% remained open for submissions year-round.
A quick methodological note: Journals can open and close their Scholastica submissions portal anytime they want, and many do so twice a year (e.g., open in the spring and close for summer, then open again in the fall and close for winter) — so a single journal could count two times in the above chart.
Since 2022, we have observed around a 20% increase in law reviews closing and reopening submissions throughout the year (so not staying open year-round) — going from 35% in 2022 to the current 56%. Authors can check our automatically updating table of all law reviews that accept submissions via Scholastica to see which are open at any given time.
Scholastica regularly reminds law reviews to close their accounts when not reviewing submissions. Over the years, we have heard from some law reviews that they remain open year-round to have more papers to consider when they are ready to fill their books. In such cases, we advise the editors to add a note to their "For Authors" page explaining that they are seeking rolling submissions with information on the points during the year when they plan to review articles (e.g., we review submissions during the months of XYZ).
A note for authors: If you come across a law review with an open Scholastica account that reported it is closed for submissions elsewhere (i.e., on its school's website), please contact us to let us know. We will reach out to ensure that the law review closes its Scholastica account if it is no longer seeking articles.
When do authors submit to law reviews?
The next question law review editors and authors tend to ask after “when do law reviews open?” is “when do authors tend to submit articles?” Editors want to be sure their law reviews are opening during peak submission times, and authors often want insight into the best times to ride submissions waves or to try to stand out during the “off-season.”
The graph below details, by day, when articles were submitted to law reviews during the 2024 article selection cycle (January 1, 2024 - December 31, 2024).
As was the case the previous two years, over 80% of submissions were sent to law reviews in the six weeks following February and August 1st, 2024. The highest spring submission season days were February 1st and 2nd respectively, followed by February 5th and 12th — extending a bit later than 2023 when the top spring submission days occurred between February 1st and 6th. As in past years, submissions stayed relatively high through February 20th.
The fall law review season also followed the same pattern as the last two years, with the majority of submissions occurring August 1st and 2nd through the first ~3 weeks of the month.
Over 80% of submissions were sent to law reviews in the six weeks following February and August 1st, 2024.
Submissions by day of the week
Want to get even more granular? Here’s a look at which days of the week authors were most likely to submit to law reviews in 2024.
While authors submitted to law reviews pretty consistently throughout the week in 2023, the 2024 data reveals more prominent popular submission days on Thursday and Friday respectively. As was the case in 2023, Saturday and Sunday were the least popular submission days.
A quick word on the word count stats below: The median and average number of words per article in 2024 track closely with 2023 (when the median was 21,202 and the average was 20,534). However, 2024 takes the cake for the lengthiest submitted article at 294,068 words (versus 90,976 words in 2023).
21,435
Median number of words per article
20,434
Average number of words per article
294,068
Longest article submitted in 2024
When do law reviews make decisions?
We know many editors and authors, especially, are eager to know when law reviews tend to make decisions. Editors want to ensure they're moving on articles quickly enough, and authors want to know when to expect those long-awaited decisions.
Given the complicated mechanics involved in law review article selection, there’s no way of projecting when law reviews will make decisions during the year. And there tends to be a fair amount of variability year over year. However, we know many editors and authors are still eager to get insight into past seasons.
The graph below shows when law reviews issued decisions via Scholastica looking at all of 2024 (January 1, 2024 - December 31, 2024).
As in past years, we observed noticeable spikes in decisions around the second week of February 2024. The peak two decision days in 2024, March 3rd and 4th, are within a stone's throw of 2023, when the peak two days were March 7th and 11th. However, it appears most spring submission decisions were issued a bit sooner in 2024 than the previous year, with the last noticeable decision spike occurring on April 23rd versus May 18th in 2023. As in 2023, we saw a small spike in decisions in early June, likely when law reviews with a few remaining publication slots finished filling them up.
Law reviews make publication offers every day of the year — which makes sense given the complicated selection mechanics involved.
Looking at the graph, you may be wondering the reason for all of those large spikes in decisions. Based on discussions we've had with law review editors, we're pretty confident the cause is some law review e-boards selecting their last pieces for publication and then rejecting their remaining submissions all at once. Many law reviews keep submissions in play until they're sure they have all the articles they need, just in case some fall through.
As in 2023, most fall submission season decisions happened around the last week of August through the third week of September. Law reviews appear to have spaced out their decisions a bit more in fall 2024 versus 2023, with a series of more even decision spikes occurring August 21st through September 15th, peaking on September 18th, versus more prominent submission spikes the last week of August in 2023 peaking on August 31st.
As was the case the last three years, the peak 2024 decision times correlate with the academic calendar. At most universities, law students start preparing for midterms and final exams in November and May, respectively, which are both points when most law reviews appear to have made their final decisions. It’s likely that most law reviews aim to make article decisions before those more hectic times of the year.
Below, we offer new data on law reviews’ average decision time frames and acceptance rates.
18
Average days to accept decision
29
Average days to reject decision
1:12
Ratio of accept to reject decisions
Expedites by due date
As authors receive publication offers from law reviews, some choose to ask other law reviews they would prefer to publish with to decide on their article before responses to the decisions they've received are due. These "expedited decision requests" are a form of communication between authors and law reviews that some law review e-boards respond to quickly, some respond to in a moderated fashion, and others choose to ignore.
Below is a graph of when authors submitted expedited decision requests via Scholastica by the due date, looking at all of 2024 (January 1, 2024 - December 31, 2024).
A reminder: Authors create expedited decision requests. So this chart reflects author activity, not journal editor activity.
After seeing the previous graphs, this chart of expedited decision requests confirms the patterns identified above. Expedited decision requests follow a similar bimodal wave as submissions and decisions.
The peak day for expedite requests in spring 2024, which was March 8th, actually exactly matches 2023. The peak day for expedite requests in fall 2024, August 30th, fell just a bit later than 2023 when the peak day was August 25th.
Time from submission to publication offer
Finally, another aspect of the article selection cycle we know many authors and editors are curious about is how long it usually takes an author to receive a publication offer after submitting to a law review. Below is a visual of cumulative submission by day in 2024.
As in 2023, 80% of decisions occurred within 25 days after submission, and over 90% of decisions occurred within 40 days after submission. Around 50% of decisions occurred within 12 days. This suggests that authors should prepare to wait at least two weeks post-submission before expecting any publication offers, and they should expect that offers may take one to two months to come in. Authors should not necessarily rule out the potential of getting a publication offer from a law review later in the year, either. The 2024 data shows that Publication offers were issued as far as 200 days post-submission.
There are also MANY more human and qualitative considerations that need to be understood to complete the picture.
Closing Thoughts
So, can we definitively answer the big "when" questions on everyone's minds as law review editors and authors race to place new articles and get them published? Like: "When is the best time to submit to law reviews?" and "When do law reviews usually send decisions?"
Unfortunately, no. While there are observable submission trends (as we've unpacked above), there are no hard and fast rules. There will always be variability since many unpredictable factors go into submissions and article selection! For example:
- There may be times when journals are looking for very particular articles because they filled all but a handful of available slots earlier in the year.
- The length of each law review’s article selection process (i.e., three days vs. two weeks) will affect when it can make offers and consider competing ones.
- Some editors want to build up a queue of hundreds of articles to compare all at once, while others want to read articles as they come in a rolling fashion.
Our best takeaway is that authors should not miss opportunities to submit when they know most law reviews are active. At the same time, they should not ignore the reality that law reviews make decisions year-round.
We encourage authors to avoid attempting to game the system and instead default to a more basic tool: communication. Target a journal for publication, and then ask them when they plan to start reviewing submissions. They might just tell you — and in more concrete detail than these aggregated charts ever will.
In closing, we wish legal scholars and law review editors the best in their publication endeavors!
- The Scholastica Team