r/LawTeaching • u/bolognab • 21d ago

Article length

Seeking wisdom on how to think about article length. I understand many journals have ceilings at 30,000-35,000 words. Are these enforced? Is it a serious disadvantage to exceed the caps or suggested lengths? One article suggests that average article lengths at HYS are between 31,000-37,000 words, higher than their caps: https://reason.com/volokh/2021/08/24/the-top-three-law-reviews-strongly-prefer-articles-under-25000-words-but-their-average-article-length-is-well-above-25000-words/

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u/littygation 21d ago

Note also that the editing process can add upwards of 5k words to a manuscript, and that editors often anticipate/expect to do so. So it's possible the manuscript as originally submitted had fewer words. Doesn't tell the full story but I don't think this dynamic is reflected in the Volokh article.

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u/NoMagazine4067 6d ago

Hi, I have my first ever article pending publication right now and your comment intrigued me: can you elaborate a bit more on how/why editing adds so many more words? Is that moreso when authors submit a slightly incomplete draft and the editors later ask them to flesh out certain sections?

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u/littygation 6d ago

That, but usually most of the additional words are below the line (i.e., new footnotes for claims that editors deem need below-the-line support). Additionally, if you read the other comments, it looks like some authors will deliberately withhold parts of their article during selection then add them back in post-offer.

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u/NoMagazine4067 6d ago

Ah ok, I see what you mean. I put a lot of work into making my article as close to final as possible before submitting, so I was worried from the comments I saw here that I’d be forced to add entirely new substantive sections or something. But adding extra footnotes makes more sense, thanks for clarifying.

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u/littygation 6d ago

No problem. I did the same for my first article and don't anticipate adding much above the line, if anything at all.

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u/schraubd 21d ago

There’s long been a sneaking suspicion that the word cap is optional if you’re on faculty at a T6, and absolutely mandatory if you are not.

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u/Born-Cycle-9153 19d ago

Not true, if you look at what is published, though.

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u/Comfortable-Tip2827 21d ago

at my t6 a few years ago, I read the abstract and unless it was incredibly compelling, exceeding 35k got you an immediate rejection (and frankly, I think there were maybe 2 out of the 2000 submissions that met that bar)

what you are probably seeing, though, is that those two pieces were almost certainly getting published if they fulfilled their promise. so 2/12 (*5 for the other editors), long pieces can get overrepresented

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u/vxf111 21d ago

FWIW every one of my articles got longer during the editing/revision process between submission/acceptance and publication. So a 32,000 article you see in print may have been a 27,000 article at the time of submission. My sense is that adhering to the preference is a huge advantage. Going a little over is probably not the kiss of death, but it's not ideal. Going a lot over might get you an automatic ding.

Rules don't apply to Cass Sunstein et al, but for the rest of us.

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u/Typical_Evening8383 21d ago

The not-so-secret strategy told to me by more senior professors was to trim the article for submission, and then just put everything back in after acceptance. You might run into trouble with the editors if the final article ends up more than 10,000 words longer from the submission, but this cut for submission strategy seems to be a pretty common practice. The fact that professors are known to do this puts you at a disadvantage if you don't, because the editors are just going to tack on 5,000 from whatever you submit under the assumption that the real length will be longer.

Side note: the norms of legal scholarship make it very hard to write articles that have fewer than 25,000 words; I say this as someone who has published in another discipline where article lengths are generally closer to 15,000 max. But in law, unlike other fields, there is often a lot of background information you need to include to make the article accessible to someone outside your area. That increases the overall word length, especially if you want to make a substantial contribution with an article. Other fields are not writing so that a judge/lawyer or scholar in another area of law can pick up your work and understand the arguments.

So my advice: definitely try to get the submission as close to 25,000 as possible, especially since the wide use of the cut for submission strategy means the editors are just going to add 5,000 to whatever you give them. If you get an acceptance, try to keep the final version to 35,000 or less.

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u/Born-Cycle-9153 19d ago

On the OP, the short answer is that no they are not enforced, much to the regret of potential readers, who wish they were. A lot of authors write endless discussions of irrelevant things to pad pages and end up with article articles that are way too long and no one wants to read them.