A goal of our peer review Free Speech Law Journal is to be able to publish quickly, when the author wishes. We weren’t always as quick as we would have liked, but it looks like we now have the staff and procedures to be quite efficient.
Consider the paper we just published today, Professor Samantha Barbas’ paper The history of Beauharnais v. Illinois. It was submitted to us on January 5, 2023. The article was blind reviewed and we accepted it on January 16. (We tell people we’ll get back to them within 14 days, and so far we’ve never strayed from that commitment.)
The author took the time necessary to make some edits and to have the article’s citations checked by a research assistant. (We prefer this, although if the author doesn’t have access to research assistants, we can assign a student editor to do this.) One of our editors suggested some slight edits and returned to the author for acceptance or rejection. ; we then had it proofread and sent those suggestions back to the author for acceptance or rejection. There were a couple of emails following up on some of the proofreading questions, and today, March 14, the article was published, and we’re submitting it today to Westlaw and Lexis. Indeed, if the author considered the subject more urgent, we could have published it even more quickly. (The article will be printed in due course, but we believe that speedy electronic publication, including availability on Westlaw and Lexis, is far more important these days than speedy print publication.)
In any case, this is only one of the advantages of publishing in our journal. So far (as of fall 2021) we have published 35 papers and have 4 more accepted for publication and in production. These include articles by law professors from Yale, Stanford, NYU, Virginia, and Penn, as well as law professors from many other American schools, professors from other fields, foreign professors, researchers from think tanks and practitioners. Some of the articles argued for broader protection of free speech and others for narrower protection (or just different protection). Some have been doctrinal, others theoretical, others historical. Some have focused on constitutional law, others on statutory free speech protections, and others on broader free speech principles.
SO submit your work to us; you’ll get a quick response, and if we accept it, you’ll get a quick post (if you want).
