The Urban Lawyer Journal

The Urban Lawyer Submission Guidelines

The Urban Lawyer (TUL) welcomes submissions of Articles, Comments, Notes, Essays, and Student Notes on issues of significance in state, local, regional or tribal government law or urban legal affairs, including, without limitation the areas of land use, housing, environmental and energy law, ethics, local government, civil rights, employment, labor, public education, elections and voting rights, emergency management, resiliency, public contracts, public finance, the sharing economy and construction law. The Urban Lawyer will accept articles, essays, or book reviews from law students, subject to the same rigorous standards used in considering submissions from practicing lawyers and academics. Law students may find it advantageous to co-author a piece with a lawyer or academic and are encouraged to submit student notes as current law students or recent law school graduates. Student notes generally range from 7,500-15,000 words, including footnotes.

TUL requests that contributors comply with the following standards:

Electronic Submission
We strongly encourage contributors to submit their manuscripts electronically, in Microsoft Word format, 12-point type size and double spaced, through the Scholastic site.

Length Limitations
The Urban Lawyer has a word limit of 30,000 words (including footnotes), and a preference for 25,000 words or fewer. We value brevity and look favorably on pieces below the 30,000-word ceiling. A piece will be considered an essay if it is fewer than 10,000 words, and its primary purpose is to advance an idea, summarize a development, or initiate or engage in discussion. Additionally, the author’s name should be followed by a star footnote (*), providing information that identifies the nature of the author’s work or a short bio. Star footnotes generally should not exceed 100 words.

Anonymous Submission
To facilitate our anonymous review process, please confine your name, affiliation, biographical information, and acknowledgments to a separate cover page. Please include the manuscript’s title on the first text page.

Style
The text and citations of the submission should conform to the current edition of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, copyright by the Columbia Law Review Association, the Harvard Law Review Association, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal.

Ethics Policy

(I) Originality: Submissions must be the original work of the author or authors identified on the submission, except for material in the public domain or material from other works that are properly cited or included with the permission of the rights owners. The submission, in whole or in part, must not have been published before.

(II) Replicability: At a minimum, empirical works must document and archive all datasets so that third parties may replicate the published findings. These datasets will be published on our website. TUL will make narrow exceptions on a case-by-case basis, particularly if the datasets involve issues of confidentiality and/or privacy.

(III) Peer Review: Peer review not only enhances a submission’s quality but guarantees originality. It is our practice to subject submissions to peer review, albeit in a form amenable to the typical law review selection timeframes.

(IV) Conflicts of Interest: Authors must disclose any conflicts of interest. This includes any financial interest that may be affected by the results or conclusions in the submission. This also includes any source of outside funding for the submission that may have affected or biased the assumptions, results, or conclusions in the submission–for example, any payment received by an outside organization to complete the work. If the funding helped pay for the expenses associated with a project (travel, data compilation, simulations, etc.), we simply ask that the connection be noted and the organization thanked. We do not, however, publish pieces for which the author was paid taxable income by an organization other than the relevant employer–that is, income from an outside organization or corporation that merely benefited the author, rather than funded the expenses of a project.

Review Process
TUL carefully considers all manuscripts that it receives. Each piece is reviewed anonymously. At least two editors review every submission, and many pieces go through substantially more stages of review. Although we make every effort to honor requests for expedited review, we do not omit any of our review stages in response to such requests. When requesting an expedited review, please understand that our selection process takes time. We notify authors of our decisions by email. We normally do not inform authors of the status of their manuscripts other than through email. As a matter of policy, we do not discuss the reasons for our publication decisions.