Cumberland Law Review

Publication Guidelines & Conventions

The Cumberland Law Review primarily seeks submissions by judges, professors, and practitioners, but will occasionally publish cross-disciplinary work. We welcome submissions by students at the Cumberland School of Law, but cannot consider work by students from other law schools. All submissions should include a cover letter and conform to the 21st edition of the Bluebook, and we request the use of footnotes rather than endnotes.

Please also limit article lengths to roughly 25,000 words, including footnote text. Articles exceeding that length will still be considered, but excessive length may weigh against prospective contributors during the selection process. Please send Microsoft Word documents. Cover letters and abstracts are appreciated, but not required.

Pitches: The Law Review will occasionally commission articles from scratch or “on spec.” When the journal develops new themes or articles symposium ideas, a “call for papers” will be posted on the website with specific instructions on where to direct pitches. Pitches for articles unrelated to a specific project that the journal has undertaken will be taken under consideration, too.

Timing: The spring and summer months are the best time periods to submit articles for the print edition. Decisions on submission reviews are typically made by August of a given year, but spring through early summer is the ideal time window to submit material for our pages.

Website Submissions

The Law Review publishes web-exclusive articles and commentary throughout the year. We invite judges, professors, students, academics, and practitioners to submit pieces to for our web platform. Publication decisions are made on a rolling basis, but our Board will respond to inquiries as quickly as possible.

While we have no real guidelines on themes or topics, editorial time restraints (and online readers’ attention spans) dictate that shorter pieces of 1,500 words or less are best-suited for the website. Accordingly, our website serves as a good platform for short essays, legal op-eds, or even several hundred-word commentaries on a news item or legal development. The editors will gladly review and consider longer articles for the website, but as a general rule cannot accept web submissions over 7,000 words.
We prefer web submissions to contain endnotes rather than footnotes. We also recognize that many contributions will use citations rather sparingly, if at all. Regardless of a submission’s form or length, all pieces accepted for publication will be fact-checked by our editorial staff. Each contribution is attributed to prospective authors and archived in such a way that readers can easily retrieve them. Material that complements the articles and subjects of our print editions are of great interest.