Aims & Scope

The BYU Law Review promotes excellence in legal scholarship by supporting legal professionals and BYU law students in publishing first-class articles and comments that cover pertinent legal topics.

Who Can Submit?

Anyone may submit an original article to be considered for publication in the BYU Law Review provided they are not a current law student and they own the copyright to the work being submitted or are authorized by the copyright owner or owners to submit the article. Authors are the initial owners of the copyrights to their works (an exception in the non-academic world to this might exist if the authors have, as a condition of employment, agreed to transfer copyright to their employer).

We prefer 20,000–30,000 word articles, but go below or above that for particularly high-quality works or works addressing salient issues.

When To Submit

We begin our general article selection process in January or February of each year. We review and select articles on a rolling basis until our slots for the upcoming publication season are filled. If we do not fill our slots during the winter review process, we may also accept submissions during the summer.

We often conduct a limited review of articles for our Law and Religion Symposium issue each year. During this period we will send out a limited submission call and will only accept and review articles that discuss law and religion.

General Submission Rules

Submitted articles cannot have been previously published, nor be forthcoming in an archival journal or book (print or electronic). Please note: “publication” in a working-paper series does not constitute prior publication. In addition, by accepting an offer from BYU Law Review, the author is stipulating that the material is not currently under review at another journal (electronic or print) and that he or she will not submit the material to another journal (electronic or print) until the completion of the editorial decision process at BYU Law Review. If you have concerns about the submission terms for BYU Law Review, please contact the editors.

Formatting Requirements

BYU Law Review has no general rules about the formatting of articles upon initial submission. There are, however, rules governing the formatting of the final submission. See Final Manuscript Preparation Guidelines for details. It is ultimately the responsibility of the author to produce an electronic version of the article as a high-quality PDF (Adobe’s Portable Document Format) file, or a Microsoft Word, WordPerfect or RTF file that can be converted to a PDF file.

Student Submissions

BYU Law Review only publishes student articles that have been written by current BYU Law students.