Criminal Law Bulletin

The Criminal Law Bulletin welcomes unsolicited submissions from both legal and social science scholars, as well as from justice practitioners, law students, and graduate students in criminology, criminal justice, and related fields. Although the editors will consider manuscripts of any length between 3,000 and 25,000 words, they strongly prefer manuscripts containing between 4,000 and 15,000 words, inclusive of text, footnotes, tables, and figures.

Citations in manuscripts should appear in consecutively numbered footnotes, not endnotes, and follow the style and conventions of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (21st ed., 2d printing 2021).

Each submission should contain an abstract of not more than 150 words.

In the initial footnote(s) of the paper, each submission should present a biographical sketch of not more than 300 words for each author that includes, at a minimum, the degrees earned by the author, where the author obtained those degrees, and where the author is currently employed, if applicable. Acknowledgements should also be included in the initial footnote.

Although not required, the editors encourage authors to submit manuscripts in which internal supra and infra references utilize Word’s cross-reference feature so that internal cross-references to other footnote numbers can be automatically updated as other footnotes are added or removed.

Manuscripts should be prepared in Microsoft Word format. Because the inclusion of an author’s résumé or curriculum vitae is helpful, we strongly encourage the submission of either document with all unsolicited manuscripts.

All manuscripts undergo an internal review to determine their potential fit with the Criminal Law Bulletin’s mission. Manuscripts that are under consideration for publication may be accepted by the editors or, at the request of any submitter, may be sent for peer review. All offers of publication are conditioned on authors signing Thomson/Reuters’ copyright agreement and upon authors making required revisions, if any, in response to editorial feedback.

Submitted manuscripts (as distinct from our copy-edited version of any article) may be posted in full on SSRN until copyright is transferred to the Criminal Law Bulletin, but once a manuscript is accepted, authors must indicate that their papers will be published in the Criminal Law Bulletin. Authors may subsequently post a PDF of their published articles in full so long as they wait at least 90 days from the date the article is published in print, provided that it is clearly marked “© Thomson Reuters/West.”