Then again, maybe there is something respectful in their behavior, after all: at least they don’t pretend to have actually given your article a second’s thought.

Of course, NYU and Texas are still infamously bad at communicating with authors, but that’s nothing new. But everyone else is making real progress!

The two windows are Spring (roughly mid/late February to the end of classes in April) and Fall (roughly mid-August to the end of September). To get placed in a law review, you really ought to submit during one of those windows.

In my experience, silence is the kiss of death. Expeditee law reviews generally fall into three categories: (1) take you seriously and get back to you by your deadline (usually to ding your article, but c’est la vie); (2) tell you that they will get back to you by your deadline and don’t; or (3) utterly ignore you. I have often expedited, sometimes successfully, but I have never reached my deadline, accepted my best offer, and then heard back later from a better law review wanting to publish the article.

Sadly, many editorial boards seem to think that simply ignoring expedite requests is the easiest way to make them go away. To illustrate: this spring I got an acceptance from a Top 20-25 journal, expedited to about 13 higher ranked journals (having already been dinged at the others), got another offer from a similarly ranked journal in the interim, got an offer from a Top 10-15 journal off the expedite, got dinged by about 4 or 5 of the 13 expedites, got a nible of interest and then a ding from a Top 5 journal, was promised an answer from one journal that never got back to me, and didn’t hear anything from the rest. This is a very typical pattern in my experience.

Having been on law review and having served as my school’s law review advisor, I know that they get swamped with expedite requests. However, as I have preached to my own law review, it isn’t such a burden to send a polite ding or “we won’t be able to review the article before your deadline” e-mail, even if it is to hundreds of expeditors. It’s a small courtesy that I always appreciate when I expedite.

Good luck with your article!

Those names sprung to mind and also seemed most apt because we are, after all, discussing this on a law blog. Let’s assume that I had named Metzger, Hoeffel, and Tetlow instead — it doesn’t make a difference, because if a journal is weighing scholarly prominence, it’s going to check the authors’ publication records or CVs rather than rely on whose names are in the blogosphere.

(This is not to defend student-run journals generally. The flaws in the system are well documented — but no one seems to want to turn down free student labor.)

I am deeply troubled by your claim that “reasonably well established” newer law profs are all bloggers. It’s great that you evidently read law blogs, but please keep in mind that **male** legal scholars are FAR more likely to contribute to blogs. There are plenty of well-established newer female scholars with whom you will be unfamiliar, despite their increasing prominence among legal scholars, if you’re equating scholarly influence with blogging. This is all very dismaying to read, and just deepens my lack of confidence in student-edited law journals.

My (top 10-20) journal last cycle tended to like the idea of an essay leading off each issue, BUT we tended to be more concerned with name recognition than with full length articles.

There was no hard and fast rule on this, mind you. But realistically, we would jump to publish a good essay by someone like Balkin, Amar, Levinson, Tonry, or Nussbaum. Someone reasonably well established (Oman? Leib? Somin?–however you want to define this) may have had a chance, but we’d have needed to love the essay… and I don’t think we saw many essays from people in that tier. A truly “new” prof, probably not, although we did publish full articles we were very happy with by professors falling into that group.

As for advice on placing yours, I’d actually wait. Later this spring, or even in September, journals will like the idea of squeezing in a few short pieces. Or at least we did–as the number of remaining committable pages grows short, the more the value of a short piece grows (would you rather have a 25 page essay and a 50 page article, or just a 75 page article? if you like all 3 equally, the former is clearly preferable).